A British Parachuting Capability?

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Referring to

A British Parachuting Capability?

The Journal of Military Operations

Col (Ret) David Benest  

He does refute some arguments against airborne troops, but he did not address the elephant in the room: Western air drop operations are no true combined arms efforts unless you count infantry + air support as such. (Their indirect fire capability is little more than a fig leaf.)

Combined arms can be defined differently. I consider a mix of infantry (including anti-tank defences), Armour, dependable support fires (arty or mortars) and combat engineers as combined arms, and strongly suspect electronic warfare should be added.

Well, what do Western paratroops forces have after an air drop?
(1) Infantry (with anti-tank defences depending on the shaped charge principle)
(2) Few mortars and/or howitzers (with precarious ammunition supply)
(3) Minimal combat engineer capabilities
(4) Minimal electronic warfare capabilities
(5) No armour (Wiesel is a weapons carrier and should NOT count as "armour".)

Western-style airborne troops may be overwhelming against some Third World thugs, but they're underwhelming against a capable opponent unless attached to better-equipped ground forces and employed as mere infantry reinforcements.

This inability is self-inflicted. We could equip Western airborne troops with armoured vehicles (mobility, protection, payload), better EW capabilities,  better indirect fire capabilities.

Russian airborne troops in a staged (stupid) combined arms attack attack

We don't.

Russian-style airborne AFVs are repelling to Western decisionmakers because they're merely protected against light HE munitions and 7.62 mm threats. Most of what would need to be given to airborne troops to make them more capable would be badly degraded by weight restraints. This includes indirect fire weapons, whose appetite for vast volumes and tonnages of ammunition is a supreme challenge for any logistically restrained force.

Furthermore, some countries (such as Germany) have redefined airborne troops into budget forces (a cheap 12th German army division during the Cold War) or into regular infantry (Germany has very little infantry forces other than mechanised infantry, airborne and mountain troops now).

Western airborne effectively is some kind of relatively cheap infantry force or a kind of motorised rifle division when deployed with surface transports. It is unlikely to come under unusual budgetary threat as long as it plays this role. 

The real question about Western airborne troops should thus not be whether we want them or not, but whether we want enable them into an airborne combined arms force that would actually pose an effective airborne threat to opponents better than Third World punching balls.

I guess this question depends a lot on whether we believe in being capable (and having big enough balls) to send a sizeable force on an airborne mission against capable opponents. Capable opponents might have some say regarding how much of said force arrives at all.

S O

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