The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 ...

18 The Road to Safwan
weapons system. Once the Cobra crew was ready, the aeroscout
ordered it to execute its attack, while simultaneously it began
searching for more targets and evaluated the effect of the Cobra’s
weapons on the enemy.
Since there were no air gunnery tables that fit the squadron’s
requirements, Colonel (COL) James Mowery, the 4th Brigade
commander, gave Wilson permission to modify existing scenarios
to suit his own needs. Chief Warrant Officer 3 (CW3) Craig
Winters, the squadron’s standardization officer, and First Lieutenant
(1LT) John Manning, the flight operations officer, were
chiefly responsible for developing the innovative program that
paid dividends. 4
As the aviation crews worked on their target acquisition
and battle hand-off techniques, they had to fight another battle
with equipment maintenance problems. Two specific issues
plagued the aviators: keeping the 20-mm guns functioning
properly and keeping the Cobras flying. The guns seemed to
jam because of problems with the mechanism that fed the shells
into the breech. The aircraft had many maintenance problems,
the result of old aircraft flying too many hours and not enough
replacement parts. At one point, these maintenance problems
so affected the Cobras that the attack crews were forced to train
with only one serviceable aircraft. However, the squadron persevered,
added a few more days to the gunnery-training program
in September, and improved on the teamwork between
scout and attack helicopter crews. In addition, they began
working with the ground troops on coordinating their actions,
especially in the hand-off of targets between air and ground
weapons systems. In terms of vision and speed, the view of the
battlefield is fundamentally different from the ground and the
air. Substantial training and practice are needed to overcome
the inherent perception difficulties in order to ensure the
smooth hand-off of responsibility for a target from the air to
ground, or ground to the air. Proficiency gained in all of these
complex tasks led to effective scout weapons teams in the Arabian
Desert. 5
The final element of the gunnery period was the platoon battle
run. Wilson wanted to integrate his aviators into this event,
because that is how they would operate once in the field. Since