The Primacy of Passive Air Defense
Brandon Morgan | 09.06.21
The Primacy of Passive Air Defense
On a distant Pacific Island battlefield, a section of US Army air defenders mans its perimeter on a relatively quiet night. The war, if you could call it that, had carried on for years. The US government continued to slog through painful negotiations with an adversary determined to leverage the American public’s growing disdain for the conflict against the diplomats and senior military officers. The air defenders, observing no threats on their state-of-the-art radar, turn their conversation to the upcoming baseball season. One soldier, tired of the banter, turns the radio to his favorite broadcast for a moment of solitude. Like the rest of his section, he is entirely unaware that a cheap, low-tech biplane is rumbling toward the air defenders’ position, flying so low that the highly advanced American radars cannot distinguish the enemy plane from the surrounding ground clutter. Without warning, a tremendous blast throws him across his entrenchment—his right side numb and seemingly dysfunctional—but he is the lucky one. On the other side of their firing position, his fellow soldiers lie dead, with their gun emplacement twisted, disfigured, and completely destroyed.
This story embodies many of the anticipated characteristics of future warfare. But it is not an imagined one, set in 2043 or 2033. It is the story of real events that took place on April 15, 1953. It is the story of the last successful enemy aircraft attack against US soldiers. In this case, the culprit was likely a Soviet-built, North Korean–operated Polikarpov Po-2 biplane. Rather than attempt to outfly and outcompete the advanced US Air Force jet fighters head to head, the North Koreans resorted to asymmetric tactics, using cheap, easily operated aircraft to terrorize US ground forces with psychological ramifications stretching much farther than the relatively limited tactical ones. Since that moment, the US Air Force and Army air defense capabilities have protected ground forces with a perfect record: not a single servicemember on the ground has been killed by an enemy aircraft since that day.
https://mwi.usma.edu/the-primacy-of-passive-air-defense/
