Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide.
“Bingo” means the point of no return: the call that fuel is running dry and the mission is over. The same call now threatens the attack helicopter itself.
Army aviators face an existential crisis. They must find a meaningful role on the sensor-saturated modern battlefield or retire from combat entirely. The threat is not being shot down — it’s being benched.
The problem is simple: American helicopters cannot operate where enemy air defenses remain intact. Mission planners treat functioning surface-to-air missiles as automatic grounds for cancellation. This creates a crippling dependency. The Army waits for the Air Force and Navy to clear the skies before its helicopters can fly. This overreliance afflicts NATO forces broadly, but the solution lies within Army aviation itself.
Suppression of enemy air defenses should become a core competency for American attack helicopter pilots. For some specialized units, it should be the primary mission. Without the capability to conduct their own suppression of enemy air defenses in support of their primary missions, helicopters will watch the next war from the sidelines.
The Drone Mirage
New technologies promise to transform warfare. Companies are developing drones that they claim will be able to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess threats without human control. Some designs launch vertically, eliminating the need for runways and increasing survivability in contested environments. These high-tech capabilities sound impressive. They also remain years away from operational reality.
Manned attack helicopters already do all of this today.
Simpler low-tech drones have proven their worth in Ukraine, grinding away at Russian infantry and armor near the front lines. But this is not where attack helicopters operate in large-scale war. They strike deep into enemy territory, hitting targets far behind the lines. Quadcopters lack range and cannot yet autonomously conduct all requirements of a kill chain.
Consider the most spectacular deep drone strike to date: Operation Spiderweb in June 2024. Ukrainian forces smuggled drones into Russia in cargo trucks, parked near airfields, and launched dozens of kamikaze quadcopters into Russian planes. The operation took eighteen months to plan and targeted defenseless aircraft sitting on runways. In contrast, Army planners expect Apache helicopters to achieve similar effects on both soft and hardened targets, on demand, every night — if they can survive the air-defense threat.
The United States does not yet field drones at a decisive, war-winning level of maturity. The impressive promises from startups describe capabilities the attack helicopter already possesses. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want.” When the next conflict comes, the Army will fight with the hundreds of helicopters already in its inventory, not speculative products that might arrive in five or ten years.
The Misunderstood Threat
Most Army planners do not understand surface-to-air missiles. Late in my Apache career, I spent considerable time training with American and European ground forces. Commanders rarely asked about the Apache’s capabilities. They understood how to use helicopters when opportunities arose. The problem was that opportunities were routinely missed because no one grasped the threat.
Red circles on maps dominated planning sessions. These supposed “death rings” grounded helicopter fleets and rendered vast regions off-limits for days or weeks, waiting for suppression assets to destroy enough air defense. This model is deeply flawed. It treats surface-to-air missiles like artillery, as if they broadcast death in all directions equally. They do not.
These systems depend on line of sight. Targeting at low altitude becomes a game of geometry, not range.
Terrain masking is easy to explain. Hiding behind a hill or tree line obscures a helicopter from enemy radar and optical sensors. What proved surprisingly difficult was convincing planners that the Earth is round.
The horizon is just another obstacle, and not a distant one. A typical short-range system with radar elevated twelve feet off the ground can see only eight kilometers to the horizon. Even tall systems with telescoping antennas reaching 130 feet can see just 25 kilometers — far short of the massive red circles they receive on planning maps. While a ground-based radar system may claim a range of 100 kilometers, the target would need to be at an altitude of over 1,000 feet to be within line of sight. Attack helicopters typically fly a much lower mission profile of 50 feet and below. Horizon range matters more than advertised maximum range for low-altitude operations.
When helicopters do crest the horizon, missile radars face another problem: ground clutter. A lone object in an empty sky is easy to spot. One flying low among rocks, trees, and infrastructure is not. Some radars handle low-altitude acquisition better than others, but all struggle with clutter.
Two Kinds of Deep Strike
Attack helicopter operations deep behind enemy lines fall into two categories: dynamic and fixed.
Dynamic targeting focuses on smaller armor and artillery units dispersed around the battlefield. Helicopters face short-range brigade-level systems — infrared shoulder-fired missiles, optically aimed systems with 30-millimeter guns, and radar-guided launchers. Just beyond the close fight, the helicopter flight profile keeps them below distant long-range surveillance radars that provide early warning. The networked threat umbrella becomes tattered at the edges, shrinking reaction time against pop-up attacks.
These targets sit relatively close to friendly forces, allowing helicopters to lean on artillery support and pair with drone sensors to engage missiles without exposing themselves. With correct tactics, directly engaging many of these lower-tier, decades-old systems is feasible. Surface-to-air missile hunting at this level is less about contributing to the strategic suppression campaign and more about organically supporting their own attack missions within their area of operation.
Fixed targets are static formations or infrastructure deeper in enemy territory, well outside the reach of friendly support. Here, helicopters enter the dome of medium- and long-range strategic systems. Radar coverage appears intimidating, but holes form when three-dimensional terrain is considered. The greater threat comes from aerial surveillance, which may cue advanced long-range missiles.
Deep missions stretch helicopter fuel limits, so crews focus on exploiting gaps in radar coverage to bypass missiles en route to objectives. They may need to engage some systems to open gaps. Early in the Russo-Ukrainian War, a Ukrainian Hind helicopter used favorable terrain to destroy a Russian medium-range launcher from point-blank range, proving the ominous range rings can be penetrated. The bigger danger comes from high-end, short-range systems acting as point defense for strategic launchers.
Deep operations also offer a chance to integrate helicopters into comprehensive air defense suppression by penetrating the bubble and closing distance on long-range assets. But the modest range of rockets and Hellfire missiles may not suffice.
New Weapons
The Spike missile changes the calculus. This long-range weapon uses an electro-optical guidance system controlled via data link by a joystick in the gunner’s station. The gunner sees what the missile sees, steering it in first-person view. Because the missile carries its own optical sensors, the firing helicopter remains hidden during guidance. In testing, Apaches have hit targets from 32 kilometers away.
This capability is extremely promising for standoff suppression missions and has let Army aviation brigades experiment with surface-to-air missile hunting. But the Apache may not be the right platform. Suppression aircraft would need dedicated weapons loadouts and battlefield positioning, sacrificing valuable anti-armor firepower.
A better solution: mount Spike launchers or similar weapons in the cabin of a Black Hawk utility helicopter. Fly this “Spike Hawk” (Sikorsky calls their version the “quiver”) a few miles behind the Apaches to handle long-range threats too dangerous for direct engagement. Keeping fire support within the organic control of the aviation command structure solves common problems helicopters face with traditional artillery: range, priority, communication, and coordination.
Proven in Combat
Helicopters have suppressed air defenses before. In 1991, Apache helicopters conducted the opening strike of Desert Storm. Flying 50 feet above the ground under darkness, they approached Iraqi early warning radars unprepared for low-altitude helicopters. The strike cleared the way for the air campaign.
Two decades later during NATO operations in Libya, attack helicopters eliminated remaining surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery after the larger suppression campaign succeeded. These operations demonstrate two use cases: long-range penetration strikes on strategic radar sites, and self-sufficient elimination of residual air defense systems.
The Path Forward
It is time for Army pilots and planners to rethink their training and culture. Surface-to-air missiles can no longer be obstacles in the way of a mission — they must be an inherent part of the mission. Pilot mentality must shift from defensive posturing to deliberate offensive operations.
The red circle model of battlefield analysis is not tenable. Surface-to-air missiles have practical limitations that helicopter flight profiles can exploit. This requires a more thorough training curriculum than simple vehicle identification and range memorization.
Army planners need better understanding of friendly air defense suppression capabilities, especially beyond kinetic effects. Compared to air and naval forces, American and NATO ground forces have an underdeveloped grasp of what electronic warfare contributes to the fight.
The counter-drone fight presents another challenge. Drones extend air defense capabilities, saturating airspace with surveillance assets and potential weapons targeting low, slow aircraft. Yet the fear that swarms of cheap drones make the battlefield unnavigable has proven largely unfounded in Ukraine. Open source reporting shows drone-on-helicopter shootdowns happening only a handful of times — twice in 2024 and once in 2025.
In future wars, helicopters must be able to conduct their own suppression of enemy air defenses, or they will be unable to conduct their primary mission sets. Developing a suppression-centric mission today is the only way to ensure helicopters participate in the next fight rather than watch from the sidelines. The alternative is obsolescence.
Stephen Olguin is a former Army chief warrant officer and Apache helicopter pilot. He currently works in aviation threat simulation and modeling for the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. government or Department of Defense.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Midjourney
