Are Attack Helicopters Obsolete?
Missiles and drones drive manned gunships toward irrelevance.
When Ukrainian brigades rolled out across southern and eastern on the night of June 4, 2023, kicking off Kyiv’s long-anticipated—and ultimately doomed—2023 counteroffensive, Russian air force helicopters were waiting for them.
Ukraine had concentrated its best air-defenses around Kyiv and other major cities, leaving the front-line brigades exposed to attack from above—a flaw in Ukrainian planning the Russians exploited.
On June 8, 2023, around the village of Mala Tokmachka—anchoring the front line in Zaporizhzhia Oblast in the south—Russian scouts spotted scores of armored vehicles from the Ukrainian army’s 33rd and 47th Mechanized Brigades approaching the town of Robotyne, five miles to the south and the Ukrainians’ first objective.
The scouts called in Kamov Ka-52 attack helicopters that plucked at the Ukrainian column with Vikhr laser-guided anti-tank missiles. Mines and artillery inflicted further damage, halting the Ukrainian assault. The survivors fled in American-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, leaving behind no fewer than 25 wrecked Ukrainian vehicles: 17 M-2s, four ex-German Leopard 2A6 tanks, three Leopard 2R engineering vehicles from Finland and one Wisent engineering vehicle from Germany.
The Battle of Mala Tokmachka was a stinging defeat for Ukraine. It was also, in retrospect, the swan song of Russia’s once-fearsome attack helicopter force. The Ka-52s helped blunt that initial Ukrainian attack—and continued hounding Ukrainian mechanized columns for the next several months.
But the battlefield was changing. Not just in Ukraine, but everywhere. Increasingly dense ground-based air-defenses were already a serious threat to attack helicopters in 2023. The subsequent proliferation of explosive first-person-view drones, millions of which now buzz over the widening no-man’s-land in Ukraine every year, may be the death knell for the whole concept of the manned helicopter gunship.
