The Airmobile Concept: LTG Harry Kinnard

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from LTG Harry Kinnard. In this special episode, Kinnard explains how he helped develop the Airmobile Concept, and how it played out during Vietnam.

LTG Harry Kinnard:

I'm Harry Kinnard, K-I-N-N-A-R-D. I'm a retired lieutenant general of the US Army, and I'm going to talk about the airmobile concept.

When the House Board was formed, I was executive officer to the Secretary of the Army named Stahr, but I had just been nominated for my first star, brigadier general. I was actually asked to be a member of the Howes board. I was invited to be a member when they were formed, but I had a chance to learn to fly, which I wanted to do at Fort Rucker. I asked General Howze if he would hold me excused and let me learn to fly, and he agreed to that, so, although I corresponded with him and talked by phone, I was not actually a member of the House Board.

No, they did not choose me. The House Board came in with a very voluminous report, but they boiled it down to a couple of pages, and the punchline was, at the time it'd come, that aircraft not only could replace a lot of other things that the Army to use, but that it was inevitable that they were going to do that, and then they recommended five kinds of organizations based on aircraft rather than on ground-based systems. Their report was evaluated by the Army and there was a lot of toing-and-froing in the Army about what they were going to do about this thing. Finally, what they elected to do and decided they had to do was to test two of the five recommended units.

After the Army decided to do that, and they were casting about for somebody to run it, my name came up. I don't know exactly how, but General Wheeler, who was then the chief of staff of the Army, called me in. At that time, I was assistant division commander of the 101 down at Fort Camo. I got a call, "The chief of staff wants to see you in Washington." I was searching my soul for what I'd done wrong recently, and I couldn't find anything. I went up to Washington, and General Wheeler called me in. I remember his words very distinctly. He said, "Harry, the Army is going to test the air mobility concept to determine how far and how fast they can go and should go, and you're going to do the testing." I was flabbergasted, but all I could say was, "Yes, sir," and then he gave me some really good news. He told me I was going to be able to select a lot of my people, not only officers, but some of my NCOs and key people, so I left his office at a high hover. I was really delighted, particularly delighted because he had given me such a broad-mission type order. He didn't tell me how I was going to do it or anything else. He just said, "Try it out and see if it worked."

I think there were mixed feelings among the people that came in. I made a point to try to talk to every man of every rank that came into the division because, for a couple of days, I was the only name on the morning report. I was, literally, the first guy aboard. I got to eyeball everybody coming in and talk to them and try to give them a sense of what we were doing.

A lot of them, when they first came, in the first place, they didn't know what it was all about and, the second place, they had been to testing parties before which had not done very much and they had misgivings about how much we were going to be able to do and that kind of thing. I tried my best to instill in everybody the idea that what we were doing was important and that I wanted them to give it their best shot and I wanted them to think in new and different ways. I said, "If everybody can improve even 1%, if we add those all together, we'll have something." I think that, no matter what they thought coming in, I like to think that after they'd been there a few days, they were enthused about her.

Since I invited everybody to contribute to this thing, when I talked to them as they entered the division, it seemed logical to me that we ought to have a mechanism for these people to be able to bring their ideas in and some kind of a rough evaluation of whether they had anything or not. We set up a thing we called "the idea center" and we put some smart young college graduates in there who could listen to a person who had an idea and help him develop it and, if it was really nutty, ask him some questions about it, but, if it had any merit, to surface it and we would try it out. We got lots of people coming in with lots of ideas. Some of them were nutty, but some of them were good, and we tried a lot of them.

The House Board had done a remarkable job in being able to put any kind of an organization together and call it an air assault division or an air transport brigade, but the fact is that the units which were given me were full of flaws of all kinds, understandably, full of flaws. It was very obvious to me very early on that we were not just going to take something and give it a go or no-go test. What we were really going to do was to start with something, try it, find out what was wrong with it, change it, try it again, make another change. What really it was was a developmental testing. I coined that phrase, developmental testing, because that's really what it was. We did a great deal of development, things that simply didn't exist because the idea of using aircraft to fight with didn't exist. It was a new idea. It was not just different in degree, it was different in kind. It was brand new. I mean, we were the first unit in the whole world that was trying to use aircraft as their principal method of doing everything.

See, before that, everybody had used aircraft as an adjunct, as a supplement, but this was new with us. It wasn't going to be a supplement. It was going to be the thing, so that called for all kinds of developmental work and it also called for a state of mind. It called for beginning to think in airmobile terms. The more we used it, the more we did develop what I called an air-mobile state of mind because, instead of thinking in terms of miles, you began to think in terms of minutes, minutes of flight time and, instead of thinking of roads and bridges and railroads and rivers and so forth, you began to think of flight route and altitudes and escort and that sort of thing.

It really was an airmobile state of mind and it took a lot of doing to develop it, so, all the time, we were holding brainstorming sessions and we were trying to go back and refight World War II battles, but using helicopters and doing everything we could to begin thinking in a new way so that we could really wring this thing out and find out how good it was and what the Army ought to do with it.

In some ways, it definitely was cavalry revisited because, you see, when the cavalry met on horses, they had a mobility differential over a man on foot. They could move faster and farther, but then, in the era of the motor vehicle, there came a time when cavalry did not have a mobility differential over the other people in the other arms, and so we really didn't have a true cavalry in the sense of somebody who could move faster and farther. When we got the helicopter, we could do that again. The helicopter could move faster and farther and less impeded by obstacles and anybody else and, therefore, it could be a true cavalry again.

It was a lot more than that because it also allowed you, for example, to move artillery to places where artillery had never been before. It allowed you to have a different kind of artillery, rockets instead of tube artillery. Most of all, however, the important thing about air mobility was it allowed you to focus on the enemy. You no longer had to fight the terrain because you were overlying the terrain and you could go right at the enemy. In my mind, that was the most important single aspect of air mobility. Because you could move faster than any of enemy, any kind of land force and, in almost any type of terrain, it was impossible for him to really break contact in a permanent way. Now, the people that we were fighting in Vietnam were probably the best at that than anybody in the world, and even they were not able to really break contact with us and continue to do so. We could always grab them again.

The helicopter is a very unique and wonderful vehicle in my opinion, and I think it's because it can fly in the sense that it's above the surface of the earth while remaining motionless with respect to the earth and, because it can do that, it stops and then lands instead of landing and then stopping like a fixed wing. This allows you to do all sorts of things that the Army needs done. In the first place, it can be based forward with the Army. It doesn't have to be at a base which automatically has to be way back someplace. It can be right there with the ground troops. I think that's why the Army became so enamored of the helicopter rather than the fixed wing.

The fact that it can fly sideways, backwards, up and down, all the rest of it, you can interface if you like. You can interface with the ground. You can allow people to step out of it while it's hovering. We invented a Chinook ladder and, with it, we'd have the Air Force blow a hole in the jungle and then we'd hover above the hole, lower the Chinook ladder. You could have men going up or down. What that meant was that there's no terrain in the world that we can't get to with the helicopter. It just doesn't exist. We can go anywhere and, therefore, we can focus directly on the enemy. The helicopter is really a marvelous piece of equipment.

Well, we had a tremendous number of problems while we were testing the airmobile concept, not the least of these was that the Air Force really wanted our scalp. I mean, the Air Force did not want the Army to have its own air army again. We didn't want to have our own air army as such. We wanted to integrate this into the Army. Nevertheless, they took a very dim view of what we were doing and they wanted to have parallel testing of an Air Force concept and, really, they were hoping we wouldn't make it. That was very obvious. I found out in later years that they even had a committee with general officers on it whose principal duty was to figure out ways of shooting down the air assault division.

We had a lot of other problems. Many of them were within the Army itself. This idea was so new and so radical that even good officers and others in the Army questioned it. I mean, they just didn't think that there was anything there and they didn't think it would work. Beyond that, the requirements of Vietnam were very heavy particularly for helicopters, for pilots and so forth. All the time that we were trying to train and test, we were having to have our people shipped out to go to Vietnam. We would have to train full units, send them out and that kind of thing.

Then we had an enormous number of visitors down there, and just looking after the visitors and all was a problem, and then, finally, when we became the 1st Cav, they gave us entirely too little time to move to Vietnam and, not only that, President Johnson decided not to call a state of emergency, and that was bad news indeed because it meant that I had to move a lot of my men out of the division and bring in new ones just as we were going to war because many of the men were not eligible to go overseas unless an emergency were called by the president. I think it was a major mistake. I think a lot of other people think that, too, in hindsight, but, apparently, he had his own reasons. I really think that President Johnson felt that he could have the great society and fight Vietnam at the same time, and he always had difficulties with his priorities in those two things.

We had real misgivings that the Army would not adopt an air assault division. We thought that with all the problems that they had that they might well just send us back to our units and that would be the end of it. I was delighted that we were going to become a regular Army division. I had already been told that, at the same time the announcement was made, that we were a Red Army division. They'd say, "PS," and, "You're going to go to Vietnam." I wasn't really surprised, but I'd also been told that the president would declare a state of emergency on that very same talk. That, he did not do, and that hurt us very badly because of having to bring in all these new men at exactly the time we were trying to pack and train people to be parachutists and 99 other things and go to war, incidentally. It was a very tough road to hoe.

I had a meeting with the chief of staff of the Army on my way to Vietnam, and it was he, not the president, that told me that, in his opinion, in his judgment, the most important thing we would do would be to keep the enemy from cutting Vietnam in two, from Pleiku to Qui Nhơn on that main access and, therefore, he felt that our proper position was in the highlands where we could prevent that.

When I got to Vietnam, I found that General Westmoreland, unfortunately, had not followed what we were doing and really knew very little about the air assault division, understandably, and he told me. He said, "I know what I want to do with your division. I'm going to put a brigade here, a brigade here, brigade all over Vietnam." I said, "Sir, let me discuss that with you." I told him that that would be fatal because we only had one aviation unit and we had to take turns with it with the brigades to get anything out of it. He relented and let us position ourselves up in the highlands at An Khe. It was a semi-jungle area, and we had to clear the area and make it into a camp with a helicopter, a huge helicopter field and all the rest of it. It was a story in itself, but a very interesting one.

At the same time, I told him we needed to be an integral unit rather than chopped up into pieces, that I thought, from my study of what was going on over there, that our greatest value would be if they would put us in Thailand and let us operate against the Ho Chi Minh Trail because then we would be in a sanctuary operating against the enemy, sort of turning the tables on him. General Westmoreland was somewhat intrigued by that idea, but he said, "It's my understanding that there are already more American forces in Thailand than the Thai government wants to have there. However, I'll let you go talk to Dick Stilwell, who was comm of MACTHAI at that time. I did go and talk to him, and he confirmed what Westmoreland had already said, that not no, but, "Hell, no, because there's just too many Americans here already." We were not able to do that, but I still think, from a theoretical point of view, that it was a neat idea.

I had 434 helicopters and, in addition, I had six Mohawks, out of 30, which I had had during the testing of the 11th Air Assault. The 24 Army Mohawks had been stripped out as an appeasement, if you like, to the Air Force because they took a very dim view of us having armed fixed wing aircraft organic within an Army unit. We lost the 24 Army Mohawks.

In addition to that, I had a flying crane unit attached to me with seven flying cranes in it. They were very, very useful. We made flying cranes so that they could lift a CP, command post. We had a surgical unit that could be lifted by the flying crane, communication pod with all sorts of radios and so forth, and so it was very, very useful to me, and then we had a Caribou unit which we also, ultimately, lost to the Air Force. They took over the Caribous. They said they could fly them better than we could, but, strangely enough, they started requiring longer fields, and we got much less use out of than when they belonged to us. I had 434 helicopters, six Mohawks, seven flying cranes and, I guess, about 32 Caribous, a lot of aircraft.

First of all, the Pleiku Campaign came very, very quickly after our arrival in theater. It was a month after I said we'd closed into on An Khe and were ready to fight. We were ready to fight, but if I'd had my way, we would've had it a little longer before we had a major fight like we had in the Pleiku Campaign. The Pleiku Campaign was 35 days of continuous movement, searching and fighting with the enemy, of which several of the engagements were very heavy engagements, particularly X-Ray and Albany, but lots of others. There were all sorts of things that came out of it. A major question about an air assault unit had been sustainability. Could we keep moving? Could we logistically supply ourselves? Could we keep the birds flying? The answer was yes to all of those questions.

Now, I have to digress a minute here. I told you earlier that General Westmoreland and some of my other bosses had trouble understanding how we were supposed to operate. We were not supposed to use our heavy helicopters and our Caribous to fly all the way back to the ports and bring stuff up to us. We were supposed to use them from Ford airstrips to our own units. That's the way they were intended to be used. Since my bosses didn't understand that, in the early phases of Pleiku, I had to use my Caribous and my Chinooks to go all the way to la Drang or wherever to bring stuff up. I was doing the wholesale hauling that the Air Force should have done during the first days of this in addition to the retail hauling to my own units. I kept yelling at these people and finally got them to understand how it was supposed to work, and then the Air Force got in and they began bringing stuff up, and then I began to use my Chinooks and Caribous the way they were supposed to be used, and we sustained ourselves beautifully.

Even though we had helicopters hit and even though we were trying to pursue this enemy as fast as we could, even if we flew the helicopters right into the ground as far as maintenance was concerned, the fact is we were putting more birds in the air at the end of 35 days than were going down. We were on an upsweep again. We had contact with the enemy every one of those 35 days, which was unheard of in Vietnam, so we found out that our cavalry particularly was able to find the sky. We found that our artillery was wonderful because we would always put our tube artillery down before we would put a unit down to search. For example, it's very lucky that Hal Moore had two batteries of artillery already down and able to shoot for him before he ran into a hornet's nest.

Part of the problem on Albany was that, for reasons which I still don't know, the batteries were not firing ahead of the unit as it went through the jungle so that they could quickly call on artillery fires, which was another thing that we did, was to drop artillery rounds ahead of a unit as it moved so that, if they got into contact, they could very carefully very quickly call in fires for effect. Communications over a very, very wide area were all you could possibly want. We would use Caribou full of radios like a poor man's, what do you call it, satellite. We didn't have satellites in those days. We had a Caribou which we called a Talking Bird. The Talking Bird looked like a porcupine in the back with all the antennas sticking out where the ramp was down, and it flew around and it was the poor man's satellite. We could bounce signals off of that and down to our units because, you see, our area was an enormous area. My one division had an area of 22,500 square miles. Now, the country of Holland is 13,000 square miles. We had an area of operation almost twice the size of the country of Holland. No other division in the world could have operated over that kind of distance, but we did it and we did it on a regular basis.

There's one thing I'd like to add about the Pleiku Campaign. It really matched the first year Cavalry against a reinforced division of the enemy, of which most of the units were North Vietnamese regulars. We not only whipped them, but we chased them back into Cambodia with very heavy losses. The estimated killed alone were like 1,800 people, which is a lot of casualties. At the end of that campaign, as they went across the border into Cambodia, I asked for permission to follow them into Cambodia because I wanted to really put them out of the war. I got approval in Vietnam to do that from both Westmoreland and from Henry Cabot Lodge, who was the ambassador at that time. He went back to the states, and it was disapproved. We were not allowed to cross into Cambodia.

The net result was, about five months later, these guys had brought a lot of new men down the trail, retrained and here they came again. Instead of being put out of the war, we had to fight them again. That was the nature of that war over there. As long as he had a sanctuary that was inviolate and we couldn't follow him into it, there was no way that we could win that war. I think he was smart enough to see that, and he knew all he had to do was to hang in there long enough and we were going to have to call it quits.

I thought it was a very serious mistake. Particularly that they would overrule the people on the ground, I thought that was a very serious mistake, but I knew enough about guerilla warfare to know that, if the guerillas have a sanctuary and if you're not allowed to go get them in the sanctuary, it's exactly like trying to play a football game and somebody tells you, "You can't go across the 50 yard line." There's no way you can win. The best you can hope for is a scoreless tie.

General Giap once said that, "A democracy is unable to face an ambiguous challenge," and I think that's exactly what he presented to us. I mean, it was not a direct threat to the United States like Pearl Harbor or something. It was way over there somewhere and not a real threat to the United States, so he had that right, unfortunately. We don't know how to face an ambiguous challenge. We still don't.

Operation Masher/White Wing was the second large operation in my division in Vietnam. It was a very different operation from Pleiku primarily because of the locale. Instead of being in the jungle highlands, it was down in the rice bowl area near the coast and the enemy were primarily VC units, Viet Cong units, rather than being the regular North Vietnamese units that we fought in Pleiku. In some ways, it was more important perhaps than the Pleiku Campaign because the enemy had controlled this whole area for a very long time. He took all of the rice plantings. He held the towns. The people were subjugated. I felt that if we went in there and ran him out and gave people a chance to grow their rice and have their own government again and that sort of thing that the ARVN, the South Vietnamese, could come in and take it over, that we'd run the bad guys out and then that they could come in and hold it and leave us free to go somewhere else. I thought that was a very good way to fight the war, so we did our part of it.

We ran them out and the ARVN came in. Over time, particularly after we began to pull out, the enemy ran the ARVN out again. They were right back where they were. In the scope and in the duration, it was the same kind of an operation really is Pleiku. We had constant contact with the enemy every day for over a month. I've forgotten the exact number of days, but it was about 40 days, 35, 40 days. Again, with an entirely different kind of enemy, entirely different kind of terrain, it proved that air mobility worked.

I had the sense that we were certainly making military history. I didn't know what kind of history we were making as far as winning the war was concerned, probably bad history, because I don't like to lose a war, and I don't think we ought to lose a war. As far as military, I was sure we were making history because this was a brand new way of fighting and it was working and it offered a tremendous advance in land warfare, and I think that was obvious to everybody.

Well, there are two misconceptions that are very long-lived. For some reason, they perpetuate themselves. I think part of it is that it's people that don't take the time to go back and study what's already happened. If you don't study history, you're condemned to repeat it as they say. These two things that are perennial misconceptions are, first of all, the vulnerability of the helicopter. There are a lot of people who still think you can knock it down with a rock or an arrow or whatever. Not true. I like to tell people that there'd be a lot less ducks killed if the ducks could shoot back. It's one thing to see a helicopter flying around because somebody is measuring the traffic or something. It's quite something else to have them coming at you with their guns blazing, with the escorts and the fire support before they land coming in at a treetop level nap-of-the-earth and blanketing your electronic equipment with their ECM gear, et cetera. People that think the helicopters are vulnerable should study the statistics of not only Vietnam, but Desert Storm and other places where helicopters are used. The fact of the matter is, if properly used, they are the best way to get behind the enemy.

The second misconception is that, because helicopters are expensive vis-a-vis trucks, let's say, that air mobility costs too much, ergo, we need something else. The mistake is the cost of something means nothing unless you also measure the effectiveness on it. It's the cost-effectiveness that's the payoff. A helicopter is very, very effective, and it's effective across a wide spectrum. It's the only thing I know that can fight a war and also be very useful in peacetime. I mean, a tank is not. A helicopter is. It has tremendous utility. For people that know how to measure that utility and use it, it's very inexpensive because it does so much. Those are the two misconceptions that I would like to shoot down if I were able.

I think what you're asking is whether we ever used the division as a division. Unfortunately, the answer is no because, in my time, it was all in Vietnam and, fundamentally, those were brigade fights or battalion fights or company fights. Now, what we did do was to employ one brigade and replace it with another and then with another. Occasionally, we would have one brigade on the ground while we were inserting another, but, fundamentally, we never had more than two brigades involved at one time.

No, we never did bring all of the division together because we never really had that kind of a target. The biggest target that we ever had at one time was in the LZ X-Ray where Hal Moore had his big fight and we introduced additional battalions, but, you see even with them in there, we not at a full division. Now, there were times when the full division was employed except for those forces that were at An Khe refitting, retraining and guarding the base, where everybody was out doing something, but they all weren't all doing something to the same guy at the same time. I mean, one of them would be working in Happy Valley trying to subdue the VC. Another guy would be searching a jungle for VC or whatever. They were scattered all over the landscape.

I've read that, because we killed a lot of enemy and the ratio of our casualties was something like 10 to one, which I don't like those ratios, but that's about what it was, that the theory apparently developed, certainly not by me, was that you can attrit these guys and you kill enough of them, they'll say, "Uncle.” I think that's dumb myself. I've read that that became a policy, but I have no personal evidence that it was.

I think you touched on something without knowing it perhaps, that one of the units that the House Board recommended was the Air Cavalry Combat Brigade. Now, this was a unit where everybody had a ride to work, everybody had a place in the helicopter, and the idea was that they could do a lot of their fighting without even dismounting, but, for sure, everybody could ride at one time if you needed to do that.

Now, with my division, we were not organized that way. We only had enough lift to theoretically lift one-third of our people at one time. The idea was you lift them out and they do something. If they need to be reinforced, you bring the next one. With the Air Cavalry, everybody's there at once. It's an order of magnitude, more mobile and more lethal than the Air Assault Division. Now, the Army has one of these units now at Fort Hood, and it was a tragedy in my opinion that it was not used in Desert Storm because I think it would've shown the whole world how good they can be.

Well, we found that the enemy in Vietnam was very frequently refortifying the bottoms of hills facing out. The hill was here. They were all around it facing out. If we came in this way, it was bad news, but if we landed on top and went down, we came in their back door because they were facing out this way. We started landing on the tops of mountain. Now, nobody else can do that. I suppose, theoretically, you could drop paratroopers. I was a paratrooper. The problem was you have to assemble after you jump. For example, in Normandy, when we landed in the hedgerows at night, it was terrible trying to just get together. With a helicopter, you have a full squad right there together or a full platoon in a Chinook.

Now, the other thing, we started putting artillery right on the tops of mountains. They could fire in every direction. No other artillery in the world can get up there, let alone bring ammunition to them. It just opens up all kinds of new vistas. One thing that I liked about our testing was that we were free to just try all these things and, every day, we learned something new about the helicopter.

The Cobras reached Vietnam after I came home. I went back to Vietnam not as a division commander, and they were there and they were very much liked. The good thing about the Cobra was that they were designed from the ground up to be a gunship, to be an attack helicopter. The good thing about the Huey Bravo was that, if you took the weapons off, you could use it for a lot of other things. You could use it for medical evac, hauling equipment, hauling troops, put radios in it, you name it. You can't do that with a Cobra. Just as in the Air Force, if you design something to be a fighter aircraft, you can't transport troops in it, but it's a better fighter. That's what the Cobra. It was a better attack helicopter. It had better armament. It was tougher. It was harder to bring down and so forth.

I'm often asked what came of all this, and my answer to what came of all this is that, in Vietnam, the reason that we did as well as we did do was primarily because of the whole Army in Vietnam and, in the fact, became an airmobile Army. There were enough helicopters attached to all of the different units that everybody was fighting somewhat the same kind of war that the 11th Air Assault Division was fighting. To that extent, everybody became airmobile. Beyond that, in the years since Vietnam, we have, first of all, an aviation branch within the Army. We have an aviation brigade in every division in the Army, whether it's armored, infantry, mechanized, you name it.

In addition to having an air assault division, the airborne division has an aviation brigade. Special forces have it. At the core levels, you find beefed-up aviation units. I like to think that we indoctrinated the Army. We showed them how good the helicopter can be when it's properly used and, to some extent, I think you can fairly say that the whole Army can now embrace what they call an air-land warfare because of what we started with the Air Assault Division.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was LTG Harry Kinnard.

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