Quote Originally Posted by Rifleman View Post
FWIW, it's also not at all unlike the Viet Nam era air cavalry. When I say air cavalry, I don't mean airmobile infantry battalions but the cavalry squadrons made famous (infamous?) by Apocolype Now's portrayal of 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry (1/9 Headhunters) of the 1st Cavalry Division.

Supposedly 1/9 was responsble for more kills than all the airmoble infantry battalions in the 1st Cavalry Division?

The squadron had three troops with each troop having a red, white, and blue platoon. I think red was aero-guns, white was aero-scouts, and blue was aero-rifles?

Does the Army still use that particular organization?
Ok, let just make a comment here.

What made fire force was not that the use of helicopters to carry the troops into battle and as a gun platform but rather how the the troops and the firepower were deployed. Airmoble does not mean fire force (in the Rhodesian sense). How to survive a fire force action was to either show incredible land speed ability and get out of the area before the troops could be placed in stop positions or crawl into a cave or something like that and lie low and hope not to be found.

Koevoet (the police reaction force) in SWA/Namibia used mainly vehicles as their mode of transport and had a different MO as they followed-up insurgents after an incident until contact as opposed to what we in Rhodesia did was react to a specific report of presence of insurgents probably without the insurgents knowing. Their trick was to leap-frog ahead to cut for spoor so as to speed up the whole follow-up process. How to survive a Koevoet follow-up was either to anti-track to such a high degree that the spoor was lost, get in front of a herd of cattle and let them walk all over their spoor or just plain find a hole somewhere and hide until the men and vehicles had gone.

It was a kind of natural selection, the fleet of foot and the cunning survived and those who wanted to make a fight of it had not chance of survival even if they did take some soldiers with them.