Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Have attack helicopters become obsolete?" video.

  1. Helicopters are 10 times costlier than a drone and you will also lose an experienced pilot as it is shot down. A drone is a bit more stealthy. And it is probably also less vulnerable to ground fire, as just one single rifle bullet hitting the hydralic system can easily bring down even the largest helicopter.
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  2. The reason why I consider Apache superior to the more modern age Russian ka-52 is that Apache got good long range missiles, while the Russians dont and prefer firing unguided rockets
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  3. I guess expensive equipment dies off just like the battlehips did. It quickly became obvious in World War 2 that those dinosaurs with big guns and thick armor had no chance against planes, submarines and torpedos. So after the war did navies build ships the size of destroyers or smaller that could carry torpedos, as big artillery gun platforms had become obsolete. Faster, cheaper, smaller hard to hit ships with torpedos became the new prefered weapon at sea. And in the 1960s did those torpedo boats start to become obsolete as USSR began building the worlds first small fast boats armed with anti-ship missiles.. and Russia shortly spammed out over 200 of those small ships. I think that was the final nail in the coffin for battleships and cruisers. And it now seems like drones are eating up more and more of airplanes and helicopters roles. They are cheaper and you do not risk getting pilots killed. And you can get instant images for correcting artillery fire with them so you do not have to risk the lives of pilot flying a piper cub to correct artillery fire like in World war 2. Helicopters were vulnerable already in Vietnam, but if there ever was a war in which they should have been succesful, then it should have been there as anti-helicopter counter-measures were in its infancy there and the 3rd world country Vietnam had very limited abilities to challange US airpower on its own. The huey Cobra became a cool new addition to the US military and could bring much fire power to escort transport helicopters and support ground troops. But they were still of course fragile things with no armor. And against an opponent with lots of anti-aircraft systems it would result in a bloodbath for the helicopters - like what happened during the invasion of Laos when the military insisted on support from helicopters rather than fast moving aircrafts with bigger payloads and which were faster flying and harder to hit. I think that the helicopter airmobile division concept became a dissapointment in this war. People dreamt that it would revolutionize warfare as troops now could quickly move in 3 dimensions and get behind enemies and quickly close encirclements or reposition artillery pieces. But this helicopter unit was weak as helicopters could not carry too much heavy equipment and supplies. And helicopters were easy to shot down and they needed landing zones to drop the drops, and in the early years in the war did the US military lack ideas in how they quickly could create new such. So this unit became handicapped and a dissapointment that could not live up to the high expectations and dreams people had before the war. However, during the war did the helicopter prove itself as enormously valueable as an ambulance for wounded soldiers and as a troop transport alternative to paratroops. And in those roles I still expect helicopters to be valuable in the future. But aside from that will they probably get more and more replaced by ugly drones, and the diverse flora of cheap and expensive anti-aircraft weapons of all ranges and types will probably make helicopter landing attacks dangerous and suicidal. So stealth, suppression and the element of surprise will probably be important if you wanna land troops with helicopters. So small cheap massproduced drones are replacing expensive more expensive weapon systems like A10s, attack helicopters and such. And the artillery duels in Ukraine seems to have become a competition about which side got the most long range artillery and most counter-battery artillery radars. If you can destroy your enemy from more far away than he can shot back at you, then you will be able to sooner or later dominate the battlefield. The enemy troops can then afterwards be wiped out, and leave the door open for your own troops to launch your own offensives. World war 1 was partly a defensive war because of barbed wires, indirect artillery and machine guns was barriers too difficult to penetrate. And enemy troops in trenches was hard to destroy. And barbed wire was difficult to destroy and could only be cut through with either massive rains of high explosive artillery shells or with battle tanks. However often did offensives manage to punch a hole into enemy lines. But the lack of radio communication made it impossible to coordinate your troops once you had pushed deep into enemy land. Your artillery could not see the enemy, and without radio communication with the frontline troops there was no way they could hit targets that the artillery men could not see themselves. It was also difficult and took hours to get situation updates from the frontline to the Generals headquarter... so deserate calls for reinforcements from the frontline troops usually arrived too late. So when the enemy counter-attacked he had the advantage of knowing the terrain, having shorter supply lines, and being able to have more instant contact between the troops and the head-quarters. So the defenders thereby always had an advantage and could easily beat back an enemy attack as it had not yet dug it, lacked fire support, and reinforcements had not arrived to support the weakened troops and protect their flanks. So before the invasion of the radio and the auftragstaktik was World war 1 doomed to be a stalemate. Today however we do got the ability to communicate over very long distances. Far beyond the range of say 30-50km that the human eyes can see. So the coordination problem of world war 1 does no longer exist. So I don't think we will see the exactly the same type of war as world war 1 being fought again.
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