Sky Cavalry

The Korean War, according to General Gavin, highlighted the US Army’s lack of quick-hitting cavalry forces to skirmish, patrol, screen, raid, and conduct reconnaissance for the US Eighth Army. Gavin published an influential article in the April 1954 issue of Harper’s that he sent directly to the publisher to avoid Department of Defense censorship. He argued that the introduction of armor and subsequent mechanization of cavalry units after World War II had subverted the distinctive historical role of cavalry—it no longer enjoyed the essential advantage of speed and mobility over other forces. “With the motorization of the land forces and the consequent removal of the mobility differential,” he wrote, “the cavalry has ceased to exist in our Army except in name.” Through his Harper’s article and other writings, Gavin called for a revolution in tactical mobility to be brought about by his “sky cavalry” concept, which he wanted “matched with highly mobile nuclear missiles … to operate over many thousands of square miles and be capable of gaining tactical decisions in a few hours.” To Gavin, it was the perfect marriage of firepower and maneuver. In his estimation, sky cavalry could have been decisive in Korea.⁵

Soon after World War II, Gavin realized the obsolescence of the airborne division. “The airborne division is an outgrowth of the combat need for a hypermobile force in World War II, and the available commercial air transport to provide that mobility.” The advent of improved surface-to-air missiles had rendered mass parachute drops obsolete. Gavin instead advocated the conversion of airborne divisions to sky cavalry units that maintained nominal parachute capability for greater flexibility of mission should a parachute assault be required. In addition, he believed all non–sky cavalry divisions should be armored ones with a preponderance of tanks and armored personnel carriers. Gavin tested the value of rotary-wing, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft firsthand as his 82nd Airborne Division was selected to test and evaluate thirteen Bell helicopters in 1946. While he first thought they might replace artillery-spotting aircraft, he soon learned that “[we] had in our hands an air vehicle of great versatility” and urged procuring more, including improved types.⁶

Some key leaders shared Gavin’s views about the helicopter’s potential. In a 1952 interview with the New York Times, the chief of staff of the army, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, explained that the army was considering helicopter and light planes to move soldiers and weapons “within a combat zone,” intending to use the technology “to supplement and speed-up conventional truck-type transport and to make it possible to take men and weapons into otherwise inaccessible places on the battle line.” The under secretary of the army, Earl Johnson, gave a rousing speech to the National Convention of the Air Force Association that surely ruffled some feathers. “The key to our plans must be mobility,” he declared before outlining the army’s great need for mobility to negate the Soviet manpower advantage. More mobility would allow the army “to hit our enemy three times for each blow we receive.” Later in November, he stressed that one of the army’s significant needs was organic aviation for “expediting and improving ground combat” and not for duplicating air force functions.⁷

In a May 1952 speech, the secretary of the army, Frank Pace, noted the importance of helicopter airmobility while explicitly linking developments in that field to the airborne mafia, noting that the airborne soldier was a “strange hybrid between soldier and airman.” He continued, “From our airborne ranks have sprung a new breed of forward-looking commanders, including such men as Generals Matt Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor, and Tony McAuliffe, who have learned to think in terms of air and airmobility.” Pace extolled the virtues of the helicopter, its role in replacing truck transport, and the importance of air ambulances in saving lives, using Korea as his case study. The helicopter’s tactical mobility was also assumed to be critical to keeping units alive on the atomic battlefield. If atomic war ever materialized, it would require the dispersion of men and material in a manner only feasible through the advanced mobility brought by the helicopter. Heliborne infantry could also conduct ground reconnaissance, set up blocking positions, and harass columns while serving as a quick-reaction force to counter enemy forces until armored reserves could destroy them.⁸ Airmobility was the wave of the future.

From 1954, Gavin used his position in the Pentagon as chief of army research and development to advance his theories on atomic warfare and, importantly, the helicopter. He published the Harper’s article from this position and presented ideas for an entirely airmobile army. As Gavin wrote, the sky cavalry idea “came out of the Normandy experience” because he felt that airborne operations “had to mean something other than just parachutes and confusion.” Airborne operations in World War II were an embryonic version of vertical envelopment that could evolve further with helicopters. Gavin saw his role in the June 1944 invasion in northwest Europe as screening in front of the main attack and tying up reinforcements—the role of the cavalry. Upon reflection, the paratroop general had realized that airborne operations had taken on the character of cavalry missions. In his postwar memoir, he assessed the similarities between the battle of Second Manassas and Normandy, finding them more common than he had realized in his studies. Yet he believed the airborne in World War II might have been even more effective with increased battlefield mobility. Processing his wartime experience, he foresaw that “in ground combat, the mobility differential we lack will be found in the air vehicle. Fully combined with the armored division, it would give us real mobility and momentum.” To that end, Gavin urged the chief of Army Field Forces to relegate helicopter logistical efforts to secondary importance in favor of tactical heliborne operations, setting the stage for armed airmobile development.⁹

Airmobile ideas continued to spread around the army. Speaking at the 1954 Fort Benning Infantry Instructors Conference in June, Col. Joseph W. Stillwell Jr. declared that “the helicopter is a means of giving us the mobility that is so vital to atomic warfare… . [It] will allow us to disperse our units, offering unprofitable targets to enemy A-weapons and then allow us to mass our forces for a decisive blow at the critical time and space.” A March 1955 Collier’s article proclaimed the helicopter capable of making one American GI “equal to several Ivan’s [sic] through the mobility of airborne cavalry”—yet another means of offsetting Soviet numerical advantages. In July of that year, Brig. Gen. Carl I. Hutton, the first commandant of the Army Aviation School at Fort Rucker, Alabama, contemplated in Army Aviation Digest the various organizations of fighting aircraft that might help the army on the battlefield: “There might be, for example, a light, high-speed reconnaissance group, a fast striking force, an element to deliver a firepower punch, and finally a heavy fighting unit. The commander would coordinate the employment of the various fighting elements in the same way as an infantry or armored division commander.” Throughout the mid-1950s, Gavin’s ideas continued to grow at all levels of the army.¹⁰

One of Gavin’s most important decisions while serving as the deputy chief of staff for operations (G-3) was his appointment of Brig. Gen. Hamilton Howze as the first director of army aviation. Selected because of his old-cavalryman’s-style lifelong interest in mobility, Howze assumed the role in February 1955 and set out to make a strong case for procuring and organizing sky-cavalry-type units. Everywhere he went he made an aggressive case for more armed helicopters, telling the American Helicopter Society’s 1956 annual forum that the “most spectacular and perhaps most important use of the helicopter is in attack and counterattack.” Howze drew on scenarios borrowed from Command and General Staff College war games to make his case around the Pentagon. Instead of an armored division, he proposed a reinforced air cavalry brigade in Bavaria, defending against a hypothetical Soviet armored offensive. Without friendly tanks, the Americans destroyed bridges and roads and concentrated fire on chokepoints along likely avenues of approach. He assumed the same amount of air force fighter-bomber support as in the original war games. He added helicopter-mounted antiarmor weapons (still undeveloped) and helicopter-inserted infantry hunter/killer teams with antitank weapons to engage and destroy the adversary in-depth, with fewer losses than an armored division.¹¹

Howze embodied the airborne, cavalry, and aviation cultural amalgamation from which the air assault concept emerged. He had spent the first ten years of his career with the old horse cavalry. He served with the 1st Armored Division in World War II, led a tank battalion and regiment, and attended an abbreviated flight school as a one-star general. After his tenure on Gavin’s staff promoting aviation, he took command of the 82nd Airborne Division—his first assignment to a parachute outfit was as its commander. He later returned to Fort Bragg to take command of the XVIII Airborne Corps. By taking flight training as a senior combat arms officer, Howze helped the army impart the importance of aviation as he provided a general officer advocate for aviation officers. He was also part of the army elite—a West Pointer and protégé of Gavin and Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor. Like many officers in the army after Korea, Howze believed that the air force had “flown away” from the battlefield and was enamored with high-altitude, supersonic aircraft that could deliver nuclear payloads rather than supporting ground soldiers. By 1960, some soldiers were convinced that no air force aircraft carried conventional bombs and that the Tactical Air Command had become Strategic Air Command in miniature. To Howze, they “had lost interest in the slow, low regime of flight—flight close to the treetops.” The army still needed close air support. Howze realized that not all future combat would include atomic weapons or intercontinental ranges and that the army needed aerial platforms to deliver firepower and personnel from low altitudes, while also seeing the helicopter’s potential in guerrilla warfare.¹²

Emphasis by senior leaders helped bring officers of other combat arms into aviation. John J. Tolson served with the 503rd Parachute Infantry in the Pacific and as an airborne planner on MacArthur’s staff. By the mid-1950s, he was a Gavin acolyte in the Pentagon who later commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam and the XVIII Airborne Corps. (And after retiring, he penned the seminal work on the history of airmobility.) When Tolson arrived at Gavin’s G-3 office, he had just finished studying the future of the army aviation program, showing a deep understanding of the concept’s history and the situation in 1953. He noted that aviation’s purpose was to support land warfare through improved mobility, command, control, logistics, and greater battlefield dispersion for atomic war. Tolson advocated forming an “Army Airborne Corps” of personnel focused on army aircraft, rockets, and missiles over combat zones. This required “an entirely different connotation attached to the word ‘Airborne’ as to that used in the past.” After Tolson’s Pentagon stint, Gavin got him assigned to the Fort Benning Airborne Department, renamed the Airborne-Army Aviation Department. Benning became home to its own experimental Sky Cav unit under Tolson and Maj. William A. Howell, another 82nd Airborne officer turned aviator in 1946.¹³

Multiple exercises throughout the mid-1950s helped make a case for further helicopter development. Exercise Sage Brush was intended to test atomic-capable division structures and included sky cavalry for the first time. Organized around the 82nd Airborne Division’s reconnaissance company, the ad hoc helicopter cavalry formation known as the “provisional reconnaissance troop” included three elements: a reconnaissance and surveillance section, a small, heavily armed, blocking section, and an antitank section. Heavy rains during the exercise left all forces road-bound and demonstrated the insufficiency of ground mobility in adverse weather. One observer, noting the lack of mobility, assessed that “a completely air transportable, more mobile division, air supplied to small units, and better communications would lead to an atomic capability.” Tolson noted that the success of the sky cavalry during the exercise was due to the organic nature of its aviation. Like truck transportation units, regular army aviation assets were often sent to the units they were supporting, just before an operation, with the aviators unfamiliar with both the tactical situation and the assault unit. Developing units with dedicated aviation that trained consistently with the infantry and artillery units became a critical hallmark of the future airmobile division.¹⁴

The exercise also highlighted the air force’s preference to deliver atomic weapons at the expense of the army’s requirement for all-weather close-air support. Air force personnel in charge of the overall airspace delayed clearance for so long that army pilots often took off without authorization, and one senior army officer told his pilots to ignore all air force directives. Exercise director Maj. Gen. Paul D. Adams noted that “the requirement for close air support … continues to be recognized as of paramount importance and that efforts be directed toward the provision of aircraft, and air delivered ordnance, which will meet precisely the needs of Army forces in the immediate vicinity of front line units, as well as the need for extensive and quickly responsive air reconnaissance of the entire battle area.” Increased emphasis on helicopters as an armed close-air support platform and troop carrier could solve these issues.¹⁵

As director of army aviation, Howze gave tacit approval to the efforts of Brig. Gen. Carl I. Hutton, commandant of the Aviation School at Fort Rucker, Alabama, to experiment with armed helicopters in 1956. CONARC commander Gen. Willard G. Wyman authorized these experiments in June. Hutton appointed Col. Jay Vanderpool to lead the effort, and he and his small team scrounged excess hardware and surplus personnel to form a “sky cav” platoon that tested various combinations of machine guns and rockets fired from helicopters. “Vanderpool’s Fools” armed Bell OH-13 helicopters with .50-caliber Browning M2 machine guns and Swiss-made Oerlikon 8-centimeter antitank rockets and successfully fired both weapons on July 5, 1956. To do so, they “violated numerous regulations, begged, borrowed (and when necessary) stole material … to sell the concept of sky cavalry based on the armed helicopter.” The tests were done in secrecy, without money, and on nights and weekends to not arouse suspicion from the Pentagon or air force personnel keen on ensuring the army did not usurp the 1948 Key West Agreement. Vanderpool and his team continued to test mounted helicopter weapons, from M60 machine guns to 20mm cannons and 2.75-inch rockets. Meanwhile, Gavin had Tolson assigned as director of the Airborne Department at Fort Benning, where he was given “instructions to develop tactical doctrine for the combat employment of helicopters.” While Vanderpool tested armed helicopters, Tolson and Howell considered ideas for delivering infantrymen to the battlefield. The teams at each location frequently shared knowledge.¹⁶

Explicitly connecting helicopters to the old horse cavalry, Vanderpool wrote that their organizational theory reflected their understanding of how the Duke of Wellington employed cavalry. “His cavalrymen fought from their mounts,” Vanderpool wrote. “The dragoons were horsemounted infantry who dismounted to fight. They were supported by horsemobile artillery. His trains moved by horsedrawn wagon.” Everything then was horse-mounted, so every aspect of new sky cavalry units would also be airmobile. These ideas drove army thought on airmobile tactics so forcefully that the team at Fort Rucker rewrote the 1936 horse cavalry field manual using the word “helicopter” instead of “horse.” Airmobility was meant to resemble horse cavalry of old so that “older soldiers, I mean two-, three- and four-star generals, could understand the language of their day, of the late [19]30s. It did help sell the concept.” Finally, in October 1959, Gavin’s successor as chief of research and development, Lt. Gen. Arthur G. Trudeau (onetime 1st Cavalry Division commander), ordered army aviation leaders to develop plans to bridge the gap between army and air force responsibilities and develop aircraft to meet army requirements.¹⁷

The Command and General Staff College defined the term “airmobility” in a June 1959 article in the service’s premier professional journal, Military Review. While airmobile helicopter troops did not need the special training of parachute troops, airmobile operations were often much more complicated to plan than regular ground assaults. The need for definition was largely to differentiate the concept from large-scale joint airborne (parachute) operations. First, these airmobile operations were defined as “those airlifted combat operations conducted by and within the Army” or, in other words, not in conjunction with the air force. Further, airmobile operations were generally smaller and more tactically oriented than airborne operations. Air and ground elements enjoyed a symbiotic, highly coordinated relationship, often from the same organic maneuver formation that worked together on an intimate, day-to-day basis. And finally, all major portions of the operation were army units commanded by a single land force commander. After this article, army doctrine used “airmobile” exclusively, and the 1960 edition of Field Manual 57–35 was simply titled Airmobile Operations.¹⁸

The Rogers and Howze Boards

Efforts by Gavin, Howze, Hutton, Tolson, and Vanderpool in the 1950s helped establish the Army Aircraft Requirements Review Board in 1960, chaired by Lt. Gen. Gordon B. Rogers (and better known as the Rogers Board). When the Korean War began, the army had only 668 light planes and 57 helicopters. By the Rogers Board’s convening, it had over 5,000 aging, limited aircraft. The board was tasked with developing requirements and procuring new helicopters. As deputy commanding general for CONARC, Rogers received an explicit charter to review industry proposals using his 1959 Army Aircraft Development Plan. Rogers’s team and the civilian aviation industry developed proposals for aircraft fulfilling three primary functions: observation, surveillance, and transport. In January, forty-five corporations sent 119 new concepts, including autogiros, helicopters, STOL (short takeoff and landing) and VTOL aircraft. The board’s most significant contribution was recommending the turbine-powered Bell XH-40 utility helicopter, later called the UH-1 Huey. The Huey and CH-47 Chinook proved instrumental in modernizing Army aviation, providing platforms for the “air fighting units” that Howze included in the final report addendum. The board also designated replacing aircraft every decade. Its findings prompted little action beyond procurement, and was often overshadowed by the later, more successful Howze Board.¹⁹

As the new secretary of defense in 1961, Robert S. McNamara took a keen interest in army aviation. Upon review of developments to that point, he expressed his displeasure about the state of development in army aviation by way of two April 19, 1962, memorandums to the secretary of the army, Elvis J. Stahr. Denouncing the lack of action since the Rogers Board, McNamara implored the army to begin taking a “bold new look at land warfare mobility … divorced from traditional viewpoints,” one that might give the army a “quantum increase in effectiveness.” McNamara’s memo dictated the method and suggested specific officers to tackle the task, including Howze and Col. John Norton—Gavin’s wartime operations officer at regimental and division levels. The second memorandum, issued the same day, outlined subjects to explore to free the ground soldier “from the restrictions imposed by the earth’s surface” and provided a September 1 deadline for the full report, with Stahr’s recommendations. McNamara’s memorandum called for revolutionary and unorthodox ideas to take the army forward and to accomplish this study in a mere four months.²⁰

The memorandum was drafted by army officers who were apostles of airmobility—not McNamara himself. While McNamara is often given outsize significance within most historical treatments of the era, the culture of airmobility had already taken root. It was now being implemented in concrete actions by true believers. One of those officers was Col. Robert R. Williams, a pilot who began his career flying light artillery-observation aircraft in World War II. Williams had served in the G-3 as chief of the aviation branch before Howze’s appointment. By 1962 he was serving as deputy director of the Tactical Warfare Systems Office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He had access to the secretary to write this memorandum alongside Col. Edwin Powell. According to Williams, McNamara signed it “almost exactly” as he wrote it. Finally, army aviation enthusiasts had a defense secretary who supported their vision. The memo established the US Army Tactical Mobility Requirements Board—better known as the Howze Board—which got to work in 1962 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.²¹

While the Rogers Board proposed the design and acquisition of new equipment, the Howze Board was tasked to ascertain how to use that equipment. Led by Howze, now the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, the board consisted of many of the airborne-turned-airmobile mafia, including Tolson, Norton, and Williams. All told, the board comprised thirteen general officers and five senior civilian officials. The board was a mix of armor officers, sons of horse cavalry officers, and paratroopers, representative of the mix of talent and ideas spurring airmobility during the period. The US Air Force ensured it also had a general officer observer on the board, though he was not to participate in internal discussions.²²

Throughout the board’s deliberations during the summer, Howze sought input from senior officers and retirees to ensure no stone was left unturned, asking for their ideas on development over the next decade. The officers he solicited included Gavin, Creighton Abrams, William Westmoreland, and Harry Kinnard. Gavin provided a thoughtful, if far-fetched, input, envisioning the use of manned missiles to deliver troops around the world. At the same time, Westmoreland believed air vehicles would phase out ground vehicles in much the same way the internal combustion engine phased out horse transportation. In total, Gavin’s ideas represented his belief in the need for a “mobility differential” for cavalry forces. Maj. Gen. Andrew Boyle thought actions in Vietnam to that point had already proved the feasibility of airmobility, while Abrams noted the decisive potential of a mobility differential and that “in the area of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, it seems to me that it is already quite well established that forces built largely around these air vehicles are the most effective.” Because all the board members were mobility believers who had supported airmobile concepts for years, its findings were never in doubt. The board was determined to demonstrate how the army might increase airmobility.²³

Howze’s board met in an empty elementary school at Fort Bragg throughout the summer and immediately got to work on a program of war-game simulations, field exercises, and research. The board had three infantry battle groups, artillery, and engineers from the 82nd Airborne Division at its disposal, alongside 150 fixed- and rotary-wing army aircraft. C-130 Hercules and close-air support aircraft provided by the air force’s Tactical Air Command added realism to scenarios while allowing the air force to showcase its tactical mobility capabilities. The board’s members used intelligence reports on Sino-Soviet developments and capabilities, reports from the Combat Developments Command and officers in Southeast Asia, and reports from logisticians, manufacturers, armament engineers, and scientists forecasting new weapons and equipment that could be developed over the next decade. The combined effort was designed to come up with ideas tailored explicitly to reality.²⁴

Howze had only ninety days to conduct hundreds of tests, from squad tactics to division and higher-level transportability and logistics. Howze and his hundred board members ensured that they tested concepts in various conditions against myriad potential adversaries in multiple geographic conditions. They studied the role of helicopter-mounted combat as an extension of traditional cavalry concepts in simulated operations in Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Outside of war gaming, the board performed more than twenty live tests at Fort Bragg, across agricultural areas and hills of central and western North Carolina, in the swamps and soft sandy conditions of Fort Stewart, Georgia, and in the forests of western Virginia to simulate jungle. Applications to counterinsurgency proved promising yet difficult. Despite the promising tests, they “could devise no sure tactic … to ensnare an enemy guerrilla force.” The final trial occurred in front of the secretary of defense, the secretary of the army, and the army chief of staff in an impressive show that helped convince these leaders of the possibilities that airmobility promised.²⁵

After the demonstration of airmobility in atomic, conventional, and counterguerrilla situations, the final report simply concluded that “operational tasks can be done better with than without army aviation.” The board also stated that airmobile units would be ideal for “fighting Communist armies in Southeast Asia or Korea” because of the units’ extreme mobility amid rugged terrain. Ultimately, Howze’s final thirty-five-hundred-page report, delivered on August 20, 1962, concluded that “adoption by the army of the airmobile concept—however imperfectly it may be described and justified in this report—is necessary and desirable” and likened the transition to “that from animal mobility to motor.” The board also determined that airmobile assets would enhance ground forces’ combat effectiveness.²⁶

Logistics was another avenue of significant testing. The board proposed using assigned army aircraft, both fixed- and rotary-wing, to move supplies forward. The air force was critical to this operation and envisioned itself as the “wholesaler” bringing supplies from the rear forward to the limits of its capabilities, often via C-130s on unimproved runways. From there, the army was the “retailer,” pushing supplies where needed: Caribou transport aircraft and Chinook helicopters would bring them further to the brigade level, where teams would earmark and distribute the supplies to even lower echelons. Hueys would transport those teams and equipment down to the battalions and companies where needed. Every logistics element was airmobile; even maintenance and supply sections had H-37 Mojave helicopters—the largest rotary-wing aircraft in army inventory.²⁷

The Howze Board proposed five new organizations, but only the air assault division was implemented. It boasted 459 aircraft, a significant increase from the fewer than 100 of a standard infantry division. To reduce its strategic airlift requirement, the new airmobile division would have only 1,100 ground vehicles—down from 3,452 in a standard infantry division. The air assault division had significantly reduced artillery, relying on just three 105mm howitzer battalions and Little John rockets, all air transportable in Chinook helicopters. However, these were augmented by twenty-four OV-1 Mohawks and thirty-six armed Huey helicopters. The Mohawks—fixed-wing turboprop observation and reconnaissance aircraft—were later sacrificed to placate the air force’s concerns over roles and missions. Despite the increased number of lift helicopters, the division’s organic assets could only move a brigade at a time, whereas the proposed but never implemented air cavalry combat brigade was to have a seat in a helicopter for every member of the unit. Regardless, the air assault division’s streamlined organization reflected the similarly sleek structure of early airborne divisions. This likewise reflected the belief among airborne officers that their men were innovative and adaptable enough to accomplish their mission with minimal support.²⁸

The air cavalry combat brigade best reflected Gavin’s sky cavalry idea. It was to have 316 helicopters and function like traditional cavalry. Half of its aircraft would be gunships. This was a force to screen, reconnoiter, and wage delaying actions, all from the air. They were to fight like the cavalryman on horseback, from an aerial mounted position, and perform the historical role of cavalry in exploitation, pursuit, counterattack, and flank protection. The board also proposed a corps aviation brigade (207 aircraft) to allow rapid movement of reserves and equipment; an air transport brigade (134 aircraft) to support the air assault division logistically, and a special warfare aviation brigade (125 aircraft) to support Special Forces units in combat. In addition, the board recommended increases in organic aviation to all division types, a lofty and expensive goal. Howze’s board also determined that the cost of an airmobile division was $186 million more than an armored division over five years and $294 million more than a standard infantry division. Despite those numbers, Howze recommended that the army adopt five total air assault divisions, three air cavalry combat brigades, and five air transport brigades. This proposal to support five air assault divisions within a sixteen-division force “curled a lot of hair among staff officers in the Pentagon,” according to Howze.²⁹

In his fiscal year 1964 budget proposal, published in December 1962, Secretary McNamara decided not to pursue the entirety of the recommendations put forth by the Howze Board. He wrote to the president that “full implementation of the Secretary of the Army proposals at this time would be premature” and that the Howze Board “did not take full account of how the Air Force might contribute to Army tactical mobility.” One of the foremost reasons for caution was fiscal constraints. If the army adopted every portion of Howze’s program, it would procure six thousand aircraft between 1963 and 1968, costing $3.8 billion. In the 1964 fiscal year, that amounted to $1.12 billion instead of the previous $371 million earmarked for army aviation. McNamara decided to test just one division but instructed the army to draw up a five-year aviation procurement plan to prepare for any eventuality.³⁰

Howze and the commanders of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions argued for the immediate conversion of those divisions to airmobile ones that retained a parachute capability. McNamara, however, did not want to degrade the readiness of the nation’s core quick-response divisions within the strategic reserve. Instead, he proposed testing one division and developing a robust five-year aviation plan for how the army would continue to take advantage of helicopter technology. Howze was called away in October during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis to serve as the potential Cuban invasion force commander. Rather than adopt the division at that moment, army leaders decided to continue testing airmobile concepts. The army chief of staff Gen. Earl G. Wheeler and the new secretary of the army Cyrus Vance echoed McNamara’s sentiments and ordered the creation of a test division. Of course, with the looming shadow of Vietnam in mind, the helicopter seemed well suited for moving infantry around the difficult terrain found in Southeast Asia.³¹

Test Division

Despite Howze’s best efforts, many on the army staff were still not convinced that activating a full-fledged, expensive air assault division was worth the cost. The chief of staff, Gen. Earle Wheeler, wanted to see more tests—of different unit sizes, from company up to division. To do so, the deputy chief of staff for operations issued guidance on January 7, 1963, for the organization, training, and testing of one air assault division with an attached air transport brigade. On January 18, the army announced a three-phase testing program to take the concept through various trials, from platoon to division level. The 11th Air Assault Division was then activated at Fort Benning on February 15, around a small cadre of officers and men at the Harmony Church area of the base. According to Howze, the 11th was “to develop the details of doctrine, tactics, and technique for its [the airmobility concept’s] employment.” Choosing the 11th Airborne Division as the test unit indicated the impact of the airborne mafia on the development of airmobility and a shared concept of “air-mindedness” predicated on light, easily transportable units and equipment. The division was charged with further testing concepts developed the previous summer at Fort Bragg, but now with a dedicated unit, personnel, equipment, and a direct cultural link to airborne warfare.³²

The army also activated the 10th Air Transport Brigade to provide thirty-two additional CV-2 Caribous, nineteen CH-47 Chinooks, and three CH-54 Skycranes to move the division, keep it supplied, and evacuate casualties. The army reassigned Brig. Gen. Robert R. Williams from his position with the chief of staff to oversee and assess everything as the test-and-evaluation group leader at Fort Benning. Williams reported directly to Lt. Gen. Charles W. G. Rich, who, as the commander of Fort Benning, became the overall test director for Project TEAM (Test and Evaluation of Air Mobility). Thanks to the appointment of Brig. Gen. Jack Norton as assistant commandant of the Infantry School, the division met little bureaucratic resistance.³³

Wheeler selected Brig. Gen. Harry W. O. Kinnard to command the new division. During World War II, Kinnard served as a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division and later as the division operations officer at Bastogne. Kinnard also played an instrumental role in securing the legacy of airborne units when he helped produce the 1949 Hollywood hit Battleground! Every operational assignment Kinnard held was in the airborne. He was the 101st’s assistant division commander when summoned to take over the 11th Air Assault Division (Test) at Fort Benning. The élan, can-do attitude, flexibility, and expeditionary mindset of World War II airborne units undergirded the development of airmobility thanks to the selection of Kinnard as the first commander of the test division. His division started as a shell of its future self—just a single infantry battalion—before adding more units and absorbing five battalions (three infantry, two artillery) of the 2nd Infantry Division stationed at Fort Benning for testing. The pace was quick—not unlike airborne testing in the early 1940s. By June 1964, the 11th Air Assault Division (Test) had practiced battalion, brigade, and division-level maneuvers.³⁴

The airborne mindset played an enormous role in how Kinnard led his division. He was so convinced of the importance of airborne officers that all battalion and brigade commanders in his division had to be airborne qualified. Kinnard firmly believed that “airmobility is a state of mind and I found that, by and large, parachutists are more able to adapt to that state of mind than other people.” According to some of his officers, he spent much of his time talking about this “state of mind” and tried to instill an ethos of “air-mindedness” to make every aspect of the unit airmobile. This manifested in leaders exiting their helicopters first onto the landing zone, just as paratrooper officers exited their aircraft in front of their men. This was an example of a unit culture that insisted leaders share the same hardship as their men, and often more. He preached the importance of “squeezing the excess weight out of the division,” much like early airborne units, and reiterated to his men that the air assault was the next step for the army to take. Just as the World War II–era airborne division needed to be streamlined to maximize air transportability, so did the pre-Vietnam air assault division.³⁵

As the division commander, Kinnard was given the freedom to handpick his subordinates and, like the airborne innovators twenty years before, gave them a wide latitude to accomplish their goals. To further implant his airborne mentality on the division, Kinnard ensured that parachute-qualified officers commanded subordinate units, and many enlisted paratroopers found their way to his division. The division’s 1st Brigade was officially designated as airborne and formed around the 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment—one of the 11th’s most storied units and the only regiment to make parachute jumps in Korea. One of the officers Kinnard picked was Lt. Col. Harold G. “Hal” Moore. Having tested experimental parachutes under Kinnard’s command, Moore wrote Kinnard asking to take command of a battalion. In April 1964, the Pentagon ordered the younger officer to report to Fort Benning immediately to take command of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry. Moore had served as the “one-man airborne branch in the Air Mobility Division for two and a half years” at the Pentagon Office of the Chief of Research and Development. There he worked for Gavin, Howze, Norton, and other airmobility disciples, giving birth to the concept.³⁶

In another instance, Kinnard removed Lt. Col. A. J. Millard, a highly competent, well-loved commander in charge of the 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry, merely because he lacked jump wings. His replacement, Lt. Col. Robert Tully, was a veteran of the two combat jumps in Korea. Another paratrooper, 3rd Brigade commander Col. Thomas W. Brown, had graduated from West Point in January 1943 and served in World War II with the 11th and 13th Airborne Divisions. Like Kinnard, Brown was known for giving his subordinates “the freedom to run their units,” displaying comfort in the sort of decentralized operations he had grown accustomed to in the war. He would need to be even more comfortable commanding with his airmobile brigade.³⁷

To engender esprit de corps and an airmobile state of mind, Kinnard authorized an air assault badge. The badge was designed to duplicate paratrooper and aviator wings and was earned by successfully rappelling from a helicopter three times at 60 feet and twice at 120 feet. Many longtime paratroopers thought “it was a whole lot scarier hanging from a rope from a hovering helicopter than it ever was just jumping out of an airplane.” However, the badge never earned Department of the Army approval and was terminated when the 11th Air Assault became the 1st Cavalry Division. However, during its short life, it became a coveted uniform item. A different air assault badge finally gained approval in 1978. Today, the badge is worn with the same background trimming as paratroopers wore in World War II.³⁸

Kinnard’s efforts to instill unit pride were one thing, but his division still had to pass muster in various exercises. Initial large-scale testing began in September 1963 with Exercise Air Assault I, during which the reinforced 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, conducted battalion-size air assault maneuvers at Fort Stewart, Georgia. During these initial tests, Kinnard and his division realized they encountered multiple problems, including inadequate signal equipment, insufficient tables of organization, and helicopter defects. The new Boeing-Vertol CH-47 Chinook had quality-control issues during production, making the airframe unreliable and spare parts scarce. Throughout 1963 and 1964, division maintenance personnel worked directly with Boeing to improve the aircraft’s reliability and turn it into one of the army’s most versatile and reliable helicopters. The CH-47 was critical because of its lift capability—carrying up to forty-eight troopers or ten thousand pounds of cargo. Kinnard also had to bend the rules and sometimes outright ignore regulations, as flying in formation or close to the trees was unauthorized at the time. Nevertheless, the 11th Air Assault used the period to push the limits of how far the army could go with helicopters. In November 1963, the secretary of the army Cyrus Vance referred to the efforts of the 11th Air Assault as the most important in the army.³⁹

Critics of the helicopter cited the aircraft’s vulnerability and inability to fly at night or in adverse weather. Gavin always thought the helicopter’s vulnerability meant it should avoid heavily defended areas. He used to argue with John Norton and Harry Kinnard in the Pentagon—Gavin “felt it was cavalry, and it shouldn’t be used where it’s extremely vulnerable; it should be used to give the commander information and time and a little space.” However, Kinnard and Norton envisioned a far more capable, entirely air fighting unit. These ideas were tested during a massive validation exercise in the fall of 1964 dubbed Exercise Air Assault II. Hurricane Isbell pounded the Eastern Seaboard with thunderstorms on the morning of the exercise, and low ceilings cloaked the region. The air force grounded its aircraft alongside commercial flights on the entire coast. Despite the conditions, 120 helicopters of the 11th Air Assault launched only one hour behind schedule, placed a battalion of troopers on their objectives, and validated the inclement weather capability of army helicopters. Air Assault II lasted almost two months, involved thirty-five thousand troops, and took place across four million acres of the Carolinas—the largest peacetime exercise since the similarly located Carolina Maneuvers in 1941.⁴⁰

To the officers observing the exercise, Air Assault II demonstrated the efficacy of the entire airmobility concept. The new army chief of staff, Gen. Harold K. Johnson, visited the exercise on November 4–5. After seeing the competing Gold Fire I air force exercise as well, he commented, “I had the rare privilege of seeing the 11th Air Assault one week and the other concept at the early part of the following week, and I would make a comparison of perhaps a gazelle and an elephant. The two are not comparable.” Johnson was referring to the inability of the air force exercise to demonstrate the tactical mobility offered by swarms of UH-1 Hueys across the Carolinas.⁴¹

Another critical factor in developing airmobile doctrine was the real-world experience of army aviation in Southeast Asia. Airmobility seemed ideal for offsetting the advantage Vietnamese insurgent forces enjoyed in surprise and intelligence. Kinnard and other army leaders recognized this, remembering that the “Viet Minh had defeated a well-trained, well-equipped, ground-bound French force in the early 1950s.” To them, airmobility promised to be the decisive difference in the American effort. Multiple transport helicopter companies were already committed to Vietnam, providing direct support to South Vietnamese units and their American advisers. These pilots pioneered concepts in formation flying, air assault fire support, and logistics in a real-world combat scenario and disseminated that knowledge to the 11th Air Assault Division in the United States. Gen. Earle G. Wheeler testified to Congress in 1963 that “the greatest benefits [of airmobility] accrue in the counterinsurgency and limited war situations” and in 1964 wrote that “the addition of the helicopter gives the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam a mobility differential and the advantage that goes with it.” The army was enamored with the potential of helicopters to fight a counterinsurgency campaign.⁴²

Many pilots with combat experience in Southeast Asia returned to join the 11th Air Assault Division. Likewise, officers and aviators from the 11th visited units in Vietnam to continue the cross-fertilization of ideas and information. Lt. Col. Moore remembered years later that by May 1965, he and the rest of the division’s battalion and brigade commanders, along with their staffs, received after action reports of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s engagements and “were reporting to heavily guarded classrooms at the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, for top-secret map exercises. The maps the games were played on covered the Central Highlands of South Vietnam.” Division leaders quickly realized that all signs pointed to the employment of their airmobile division in Southeast Asia.⁴³

In March 1965, the army converted the understrength 11th Air Assault Division (Test) to a full-strength active army division within the existing force structure. But it was not until June 16 that McNamara publicly announced its inclusion as part of the sixteen-division army. The decision was made for several reasons but mainly because the army needed an airmobile capability to meet various threats, and the test division had proven, through training scenarios, that it could be used effectively in anything from general nuclear war to low-intensity counterinsurgency. The situation in Vietnam played a critical role in its development. To some, the airmobile concept appeared ideal for maneuvering counterinsurgent forces around the rugged jungle terrain of Southeast Asia. The only problem was that counterinsurgency doctrine required securing and controlling the population on the ground, a difficult task for an organization meant to fly everywhere. Hutton realized this as early as 1963, and after studying the eventual failure of French tactics with helicopters in Algeria, he worried that the same might happen to the US Army and South Vietnamese forces. “Because the helicopter is inherently so effective,” Hutton wrote, “these tactics do result in local successes. They fail strategically, however, because they leave the initiative to the guerrillas. They permit the guerrillas to choose the time and place of fighting, and they allow entrapment situations.” Further, once the novelty wore off, antiaircraft gunners in Algeria and later Vietnam became adept at shooting them down. Nevertheless, Hutton thought they were still valuable—especially for logistics and sustained operations—but should be used with caution.⁴⁴

Back to the Cavalry

After McNamara decided to keep one air assault division on active duty, Kinnard advocated for his beloved 101st Airborne to be named the army’s first of its kind. He also desired that all combat arms personnel within the division be parachute-qualified—as Howze had proposed in 1962. Kinnard and Howze’s belief in the air-mindedness of paratroopers and the cultural link to parachute units of World War II drove these ideas. However, that was not to be, and on July 1, 1965, the division reflagged as the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), absorbing elements of the 2nd Infantry Division at Fort Benning while swapping division colors. The 2nd Infantry Division’s standard went to Korea, while the 1st Cavalry colors moved to Fort Benning. The division was to have 15,787 personnel, 434 aircraft, and 1,600 vehicles, compared to a standard infantry ROAD (Reorganization Objectives Army Division) of 15,900 personnel, 101 aircraft, and 3,200 ground vehicles.⁴⁵

The army’s choice of the 1st Cavalry was by design. In 1965, that division was organized as a standard ROAD infantry division on garrison duty in South Korea. This fate was unsettling to old cavalrymen. By this point, many old horse soldiers from the 1930s had ascended to power in the Pentagon, superseding the airborne mafia; they included the army chief of staff, Gen. Harold K. Johnson. In Korea, Johnson had commanded one battalion and two regiments in the 1st Cavalry Division. Horses were gone, of course, and the cavalry branch was now armor. Still, these officers, who had been generally hostile to all forms of airmobility, now saw the helicopter as a return to mobility for the cavalry.⁴⁶

When McNamara announced that the 1st Cavalry Division would assume the mantle as the army’s first active airmobile division, he gave it eight weeks to reach combat readiness. Kinnard maintained command, and his division was authorized eight infantry and three artillery battalions, a helicopter aerial rocket battalion, an air cavalry squadron, and two assault helicopter battalions. However, when the order came to deploy to Vietnam, Kinnard only had 9,849 men and had to replace those ineligible for deployment because President Johnson did not declare a national emergency. Without emergency authorization, anyone who had recently returned from overseas duty or whose term of service was ending could not deploy. Meanwhile, the division made several tweaks to its organization, including eliminating fixed-wing Mohawk attack aircraft—a sacrifice to preserve air force relations—and the Little John atomic rocket battalion. Six Mohawks remained in the division for reconnaissance purposes but no longer as close-air-support attack aircraft. Later, in 1966, the army relinquished control of all CV-2 Caribous to ensure the air force ceased encroachment on rotary-wing development.⁴⁷

The 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, remained on airborne status at the direction of the vice chief of staff, Gen. Creighton Abrams. This was Kinnard’s primary brigade, the one that had initiated testing and carried the airborne lineage of the 11th Airborne with battalions from its original 187th, 188th, and 511th Infantry Regiments. These were now 1st and 2nd Battalions (Airborne), 8th Cavalry, and 1st Battalion (Airborne), 12th Cavalry. All things being equal, Kinnard would commit this unit to battle first. An entire brigade on jump status, however, required airborne-qualified personnel, so the brigade brought in experienced noncommissioned officers from the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and set up a special iteration of the Basic Airborne Course to qualify another 659 paratroopers to round out the unit.⁴⁸

The division was declared combat-ready on July 1, 1965. The 1st Cavalry Division was ordered to Vietnam, publicly announced on television by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 28, 1965. The airmobile division seemed ideal for combat in the jungle terrain of South Vietnam, as if they were created explicitly for that purpose. As Creighton Abrams remarked, “Is it not fortuitous that we happen to have this organization in existence at this point in time?” The unit was scheduled to arrive in South Vietnam between September 9 and 18, 1965. The airmobile division began movement shortly thereafter, requiring a staggering amount of surface vessels to transport its equipment—six passenger vessels, eleven cargo ships, and four aircraft carriers. Its first elements arrived at An Khe on September 14, and troopers of the 1st Cavalry Division assumed responsibility for the defense of that area on September 28, 1965, three months after the unit was activated on July 1.⁴⁹

Kinnard wanted to base his division in Thailand to operate up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia. He wanted to use his division’s ability to interdict quickly through deep penetration raids, to cut the logistical lifeline of the insurgency. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), denied this request, as it was outside the MACV area of operations. He also wanted to split the division’s assets across different parts of the country, to flood the countryside with more men to buttress MACV pacification efforts. The two compromised, and Westmoreland assigned Kinnard’s division the responsibility of securing the main line of communication, a road network, through the Central Highlands in Pleiku Province to prevent North Vietnamese forces from severing South Vietnam in two. No other unit in the army had similar capabilities. Airborne units had superb strategic mobility but were limited to whatever could be dropped by parachute in the battle area. The French had proved the limitations of such units at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Standard infantry divisions in the mid-1960s relied on either mechanized or motorized transportation, and armored divisions were far too cumbersome for employment in a jungle environment with a paltry road network. The airmobile division seemed the perfect choice to fight in the challenging environment of Vietnam.⁵⁰

The first full test of the airmobile concept came during Operation Silver Bayonet. This was the pursuit phase after a defense of the Plei Me Special Forces Camp in October from an assault by forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Elements of the 1st Brigade had rescued South Vietnamese forces at Plei Me and secured over twenty-five hundred kilometers of territory in the first battle of the Ia Drang campaign. Kinnard believed the action validated the nearly three years of hard work poured into testing and training his division. After the successful defense of the camp between October 19 and October 28, Kinnard received authorization to pursue Gen. Chu Huy Man’s withdrawing elements. Kinnard’s air cavalry squadron, commanded by Col. Richard Stockton, pursued the enemy, conducted a nighttime ambush that included helicopters firing within fifty meters of friendly ground troops, and turned the battle over to the infantry battalions. The action of Stockton’s squadron closely resembled Gavin’s initial “sky cavalry” concept and further validated the previous decade of conceptualization and testing. Between October 28 and November 14, 1st Cavalry Division troopers and Huey helicopters swarmed around Pleiku Province, searching for enemy forces. Kinnard wanted to keep pushing his elements toward the Cambodian border, and intelligence gathered suggested a North Vietnamese presence in the Ia Drang Valley near the Chu Pong Mountains.⁵¹

On November 14, 1965, the first of Lt. Col. Hal Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, landed in sixteen helicopters at Landing Zone (LZ) X-Ray. They arrived to begin the pivotal portion of the campaign after traditional artillery, aerial artillery (helicopter-mounted rockets), and helicopter gunships fired on possible enemy positions near the landing zone. The same sixteen helicopters would continue to move troopers onto the landing zone as Moore’s men fought a gallant three-day battle that included the first-ever tactical use of the B-52 bomber. Their mission was to seek and destroy enemy main force units in the valley. Despite no activity having been detected in the immediate area, three PAVN battalions were headquartered on a ridge overlooking the landing zone. Three hours after the landing, PAVN forces attacked from their battalion redoubt on the mountain above the landing zone. This unleashed a brutal firefight that temporarily closed the landing zone just after Moore received reinforcements from Company B from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Moore’s situation at one point became so tenuous that he issued the SOS call “Broken Arrow,” meaning that every air force platform within reach should come to the aid of his unit, which was in danger of being overrun.⁵²

The PAVN had stymied the airmobile division’s key capability. With reinforcements by air cut off, reinforcements from the 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry, had to move in on foot from LZ Victor, three kilometers southeast of X-Ray. The fighting subsided enough on the morning of November 16 to allow the 3rd Brigade commander, Col. Thomas W. Brown, to relieve Moore’s beleaguered men with the remainder of 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry—again on foot. The rest of the cavalrymen moved out the next morning toward two alternate landing zones—Columbus and Albany.⁵³ On the way to Landing Zone Albany, Lt. Col. Robert A. McDade’s 2–7 Cavalry was ambushed by a PAVN battalion. The ambush achieved total surprise, and pilots attempting to provide resupply and support to McDade’s troopers had difficulty distinguishing between friend and foe in the thick jungle canopy. The Americans suffered a staggering 70 percent casualty rate. A beaming Kinnard reported later that the “battalion had taken everything the enemy could throw at it, and had turned on him and had smashed and defeated him.” The 3rd Brigade handed off operations to the 2nd Brigade, and the campaign continued until November 26, when authorities denied Kinnard’s plea to pursue PAVN forces into Cambodia—the president had no intention of widening the war. Kinnard viewed the fight as a traditional cavalry pursuit situation. “Not to follow them into Cambodia,” he said in 1990, “violated every principle of warfare.”⁵⁴

To the Americans, the battle showed airmobility as a viable, if tenuous, concept. After combat in the Ia Drang, Kinnard declared that the infantryman was finally “freed from the tyranny of terrain” thanks to the helicopter. Helicopters had helped Moore’s battalion achieve surprise. They helped sustain the fight by providing logistical support and medical evacuation, albeit only by the heroic efforts of the pilots involved in these missions—one of whom earned a Medal of Honor for his actions at LZ X-Ray. Helicopters also helped sustain American firepower—critical to both fights, especially McDade’s battalion at Albany—by delivering much-needed ammunition. Further, helicopter gunships and aerial rocket artillery were influential during the battle. A Central Intelligence Agency report called it the “greatest success of the war” to date. Much of the chatter after the fight centered on how it proved the validity of airmobility and that it demonstrated that main force North Vietnamese units would remain ineffective against American forces in a conventional battle.⁵⁵

Nothing could be further from the truth, as the debacle at LZ Albany illustrates. Moreover, success at LZ X-Ray came despite Moore’s battalion’s inability to maneuver as airmobile doctrine called for. The Vietnamese initiated contact and withdrew when they wanted. They learned to counter helicopter-mounted forces by avoiding large units, setting ambushes, and fighting so close to American units that the American air and firepower advantage could not help. Helicopters were loud and flew relatively low and slow, thus providing an opportunity for Vietnamese forces to ambush Americans after learning from the Pleiku campaign. Airmobile operations were also dependent on the presence of suitable landing zones. Any obvious helicopter landing spot would present equally obvious ambush locations in areas with limited LZ space. Moreover, despite what Westmoreland called an “unprecedented victory,” North Vietnamese infiltration rates did not decrease, Hanoi seemed unfazed, and North Vietnamese forces demonstrated that they would be the ones to choose the time and place of battle. One adviser noted the irony of seeking success in helicopter warfare, stating that “when you come to think of it, the use of helicopters is a tacit admission that we don’t control the ground. And in the long run, it’s control of the ground that wins or loses wars.”⁵⁶

The helicopter provided mixed results. Even the army chief of staff had doubts about the cavalry’s performance in Ia Drang. The battle set the standard for measuring effectiveness based on body count; it established “a hierarchy among metrics most important to the chain of command.” Many units, including the 1st Cavalry Division, adapted their tactics afterward, focusing on small-unit movements and long-range foot patrols, abandoning the quick airmobile dispersal and massing concepts to instead use helicopters as mere transportation for moving around the mountainous and jungle terrain in South Vietnam. These tactics buttressed increased emphasis on civic action and rural construction programs throughout the 1st Cavalry Division’s time in the Central Highlands. Nevertheless, helicopters were integral to how the army prosecuted the war in Vietnam. Continued innovation and adaptation helped carve out an essential role for heliborne infantry formations to maneuver above the unforgiving jungle terrain of Vietnam while providing an essential vehicle for resupply and casualty evacuation. Though imperfect, the 1st Cavalry Division’s actions in the Pleiku campaign put Gavin’s concepts into action and inaugurated the “helicopter war.”⁵⁷

The UH-1 Huey became one of the preeminent symbols of the American war in Vietnam. And rightfully so: in July 1969, the US Army had approximately thirty-five hundred helicopters “in country,” with about 72 percent operational on a given day. Gen. Westmoreland called airmobile warfare “the most innovative tactical development to emerge from the Vietnam War.” This was despite the enemy’s ability to learn how to avoid massive air assaults and thus avoid fighting large units, which forced American units to change their tactics and adopt long-range patrolling techniques to find, fix, and destroy PAVN and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (Vietcong). It is also important to remember that airmobility was not developed for the Vietnam War but rather for the requirements of a perceived nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, airmobility was not a technological stopgap that helped the army avoid counterinsurgency, as Andrew Krepinevich argues, but rather a tool born of an ingrained cultural predilection toward air-mindedness in a subset of the army—the airborne mafia. Helicopters—whether designed for assault, resupply, reconnaissance, or other missions—defined how the US Army fought in Southeast Asia.⁵⁸

For three years in Vietnam, the army fielded two airmobile divisions, as the 101st Airborne converted to an air assault division in 1968 after army leaders realized the futility of maintaining qualified paratroopers in a combat zone. A minor uproar ensued about what to call the division; the Pentagon ordered it called the 101st Air Cavalry Division, then the 101st Infantry Division (Airmobile) before former 101st commander William Westmoreland took over as chief of staff and directed that the two airmobile divisions retain their historic designations as “airborne” and “cavalry.” With no opportunity to maintain proficiency in parachute training and an influx of draftees without airborne training, army leaders decided to staff nominally “airborne” units with non-airborne personnel to keep replacement rates sustainable. The 1st Cavalry Division was also caught in this minor fiasco. Nevertheless, the reorganization took a year as the Screaming Eagles continued combat operations and had to procure the required helicopters. Of course, the commander to lead this transition was another World War II–era paratrooper, Maj. Gen. Melvin Zais. Effective April 1, 1974, the 101st’s final airborne brigade was deactivated, and the division was entirely airmobile.⁵⁹

As the American experience in Vietnam gave way to late Cold War restructuring, the 1st Cavalry Division was redeployed to Fort Hood and reorganized as a “triple capability” (TRICAP) division. The new formation combined mechanized and armored forces with an air cavalry combat brigade consisting of airmobile infantry that resembled the Howze Board’s air cavalry brigade concept yet incorporated lessons learned in Vietnam. This design was short-lived, however, as the 1973 Yom Kippur War galvanized the army into adding more heavy tank units to its force structure. In 1975, the army separated most aviation assets from the 1st Cavalry Division to create the 6th Air Cavalry Brigade, rendering the 1st Cavalry Division an exclusively armored unit. This returned the army to a one-air-assault and one-airborne division force that was rapidly mechanizing to fight across the plains of Europe, relegating to the back burner the light, highly mobile forces poised to respond to brushfire-type wars. For example, the 1978 twenty-four division, twenty-four brigade total force consisted of just 3 light infantry, 9 air assault, 10 airborne, and 88 standard infantry battalions, yet boasted 108 mechanized and 129 armored battalions.⁶⁰

Regardless, developing airmobility paid dividends in restoring an air-mindedness to the army not seen since before the air force achieved independence in 1947. Furthermore, the organic nature of the airmobile division’s helicopter assets allowed a new culture to develop, because any combination of organizations working together over a period will develop shared values, beliefs, and norms about the way they interpret doctrine and therefore how they operate through tactics, techniques, and procedures. This does not happen with ad hoc organizations that rely on doctrine without familiarity. Despite its rapid mechanization, the US Army maintained a strong airmobile capability—each division now has its own aviation brigade—that paid dividends in Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and the twenty-first-century invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The ability to fly over the environment, seize key terrain, screen, provide flank protection, and delay large enemy formations while delivering infantrymen about the battlefield proved instrumental in the army’s post–Cold War operations.