Why The US Military Argues Over Attack Helicopters

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]You ever wonder why the US has two kinds of attack helicopters? Hopefully, you answered yes, because this is the AH64 Apache, and this is the AH1 Viper.

[00:00:10]They're two-seater helicopters whose sole purpose on this Earth is to transfer things from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead while hovering in the sky. A job they do very well. But that's the thing, they do the exact same job pretty much. They hit the exact same kinds of targets, use very similar and/or identical weapon systems, and are both flown by guys who love to tell unsuspecting women that they are indeed pilots. Well, absolutely horrible Nick Cage movie, The Like and subscribe button, and let's talk about it. Now, the most obvious difference between the AH1Z Viper, also known as the Cobra, and the AH64 Apache, is who uses them. The Marines use the Viper and the Army uses the Apache. But that is a surface level answer and while technically true tells us literally nothing. It's kind of like the looking for long-term relationship but open to short option on Hinge. It only leads to more questions. But the answer is actually way better and it's way more interesting than just land grunts and water grunts not agreeing on something. And just like my grandfather's secret illegitimate family, the story starts in Vietnam. But before I talk about former French Indo-China, a brief detour. Now, I talk about a lot of crazy military stuff on this channel, and a lot of said military stuff is dangerous. That's kind of the whole point of militaries existing in the first place. But the real world can be just as dangerous. And that danger can lead to some not so stellar outcomes if your goal is to be an uninjured human person. But if and when you fail to keep your health at a 100% for one reason or another, that brings us to today's sponsor, Morgan and Morgan. There's a reason why Protective Gear exists in combat. Just like there is a reason why Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. With over a thousand attorneys in all 50 states, they've won over 30 billion for their clients. With a track record going back over 35 years, they know a thing or two about fighting for the compensation you deserve. If you have the unfortunate chance to be injured by someone else's negligence, just know that you deserve to be paid and you only pay if they win your case.

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[00:02:28]Thank you to Morgan and Morgan today for sponsoring the channel. And now back to the video.

[00:02:35]In the early60s, the entire concept of an attack helicopter did not really exist. Helicopters were flying trucks.

[00:02:43]You use them to haul guys and stuff to an LZ, evacuate people who were bleeding out on said LZ, or move important generals between briefings while avoiding the aforementioned LZ's.

[00:02:55]Eventually though, Huey gunships started showing their usefulness, but had obvious drawbacks. They were slow, underpowered, and struggled to keep up with the standard slick Hueies carrying the troops they were supposed to be covering. Eventually, Bell, the maker of the Huey, decided to make a dedicated helicopter specifically for providing air cover, and they did that. That helicopter was the AH1 Cobra, which was first released in theaters back in 1965.

[00:03:23]This helicopter alone basically invented the entire category of the dedicated helicopter gunship, and for that, we are eternally grateful. Fun fact, and something I did not know before I started this video, the Cobra is literally just a Huey fuselage with the cockpit stacked and body made slimmer.

[00:03:40]And that is now painfully obvious to me if you look at the visual similarities between the two that I have somehow missed my entire life. They use the same engine, transmission, flight controls, rotor blades, and tail booms, just to name a few parts. And that's going to be important later. In fact, when the H1 first came out, it was called the Huey Cobra. One word. Glad they just decided on Cobra though. But after Vietnam, both the Army and Marines had already fallen in love with the Cobra and both decided they wanted more attack helicopters. But they wanted them for two completely different reasons. And those two reasons are the entire ball game here. This single split made in the late '7s is why today the United States is still currently flying two completely different attack helicopters in 2026.

[00:04:27]So, if you only remember one thing from this video, remember this part. This part in the inevitable sick burn I make on either your mom or the country of Usbekiststan. I haven't decided which one I'm targeting yet. But around this time, the late '7s, the US remembered that it was still in the Cold War and they had to prepare to fight dudes in Eastern Europe, not just dudes in rice patties. For the Marines, that meant returning to a more traditional amphibious focused fighting. They still wanted the Cobra, but they wanted it to be better suited for launching from a Navy ship, have a bit more design redundancy so that it lowered the risk of pilots having to swim home, and just better performance in areas where the air is salty from the ocean. The Army, on the other hand, looked at this thing and said, "This is great, but it can't kill enough tanks." The entire reason the Army moved away from the Cobra was specifically to kill Russian tanks. not generic tanks, specifically Russian tanks, specifically in Germany, specifically at one location, the folded gap. And this one location, that one singular assumed scenario is literally from start to finish why the Apache exists in the first place. In the late 70s and early 80s, the entire United States Army was built around stopping the Soviets if they ever poured through said fault gap, an infamous stretch of West German countryside flanked by two large mountain ranges. Two American cores were dedicated to nothing else.

[00:05:54]All the tanks, infantry, helicopters, the whole shebang, oriented towards this one specific fight at this one specific location. And in that fight location combo, the army calculated that they were going to be massively outnumbered in armor. For every one NATO tank, they expected to see three or four communist ones. That meant that whatever helicopter they had had to kill a lot of tanks fast, in bad weather, day or night, and outside the range of the anti-air missiles that would be backing up said communist tanks. This Cobra could not do that. It was a great closeair support helicopter for shooting at trucks and infantry positions in mostly clear daytime weather. But against a thousand BMPPS and 400 T72s with overlapping anti-aircraft coverage while in shitty European weather, the Cobra was in modern Gen Z vernacular cooked. Cobras used simple optical sights for their weapons and any kind of night vision style things were either super primitive or just non-existent.

[00:06:57]The crew had to literally make eye contact with whatever they were shooting at, which greatly limited the pool of potential pilots due to the service members on the autism spectrum not being able to hold eye contact with things.

[00:07:09]The best thing that this thing had to kill armor was a tow missile. Now, toes are fine for the most part, and we still use them today, but they are optically wireg guided. That's what the OW stands for, meaning the helicopter has to just sit there as still as it possibly can.

[00:07:24]while a very slowmoving ATGM meanders its way to a target. The max range on this tow missile was about 3 kilometers.

[00:07:32]And while that might sound like a long distance, you need to remember that a T72 can also shoot 3 km and their rounds go really, really fast. Tank crews were and are still trained specifically to take on that kind of threat. And odds are the Cobra is going to get shot down before the toe can make an impact. It's not that a tow impact couldn't take out a Soviet tank. It's that it probably wasn't going to get there fast enough.

[00:07:57]The short and sweet of it was that Cobras were made for Vietnam. Literally, they were lightly armored, quick, and had weapons better tuned for engaging lighter targets like trucks and infantry. Basically, everything Ivan had could have easily shot those birds down.

[00:08:12]And the army knew that. So, they needed something different. The DoD then started a program called the Advanced Attack Helicopter or AAH program.

[00:08:21]Looking for something completely new, it needed to be bigger, have twin engines, all-weather dayight sensors, and most importantly, a dedicated long range anti-tank missile that unlike the tow could kill armor before the armor could kill back. The winner was the Hughes Yah64, which then just became the AH64, which became the Apache in 1984. Now, this is where my personal interest in the story peaks. This is the part that I think is really interesting and just kind of fun to talk about. Apaches were slower, less agile, required way more maintenance, were three times as expensive, and couldn't fly as far as a Cobra could.

[00:09:01]From that angle, you could say it was several steps backwards of a design. But it wasn't. Those weren't bugs. Those were features. That is to say, all those bad things I just said, literally didn't matter. See, Europe, both 40 years ago and today, is made up of land. Land also happens to be the perfect location to build places that helicopters can refuel, get loaded up with more ammo, or receive repairs. And NATO did that a lot back in the day, all over Europe, and could set up small bases or camps pretty much anywhere they wanted to. So, it didn't matter if an Apache couldn't go super far or go super fast because odds are it was already stationed uncomfortably close to the fighting and would basically already be on target the second it took off while being able to land pretty much anywhere when it was done. Conversely, the ocean, where Marines tend to spend quite a bit of time, is in fact not made out of land.

[00:09:56]It is made out of water, meaning that any helicopter the Marines or Navy use would need to have a bit more better gas mileage or at least go farther on a single tank of gas so that it can actually make it from one objective to another because stopping halfway because you're out of fuel between islands means wet socks and helicopter no work no more. But the bigger differences start to show when you look at how the Apache ended up taking a very different role than the Cobra did when it was in army service. See, back in NM, helicopters were used for direct support, getting grunts out of sticky situations, providing protection on flanks, whatever the guys on the ground really needed. In a theoretical war with the Ruskies, though, they would take on a more independent role. You can't really wait for some guy to call in air support to get into the fight when you have thousands of tanks and APCs screaming to the west. Apaches were built around the army's air land battle doctrine. And no, I did not forget to put a space there.

[00:10:54]They made airland one word probably for I don't know symbolic reasons. Airland battle emphasized a maneuver defense for the army. Meaning we weren't just going to sit there and take it. Kind of like when my gin teacher but Apaches were a critical lynch pin to that strategy.

[00:11:09]Their job was to blunt the Soviets primary attacks. AH64s were organized into four ship teams, each made up of a two ship pair called a section. And these guys' job was very simple. ambush tanks. They would do this by flying nap of the earth or near as possible. And this meant flying as low as they could get away with using hills and forests to block sightelines. Soviet doctrine at the time relied on a massive push along the entire front, mostly done with lighter armor. And when a breakthrough happened or a weak point identified, the heavier tank units would be pushed through. And it was the Apache's job to make sure that those heavier tank units did not get to the breakthrough point.

[00:11:51]By virtue of being helicopters, they'd be able to get anywhere at any point that this might be happening. And a lot faster than any ground units would be able to move in and plug the gap. You know, funny enough, groups of men rushing to be the first to plug a gap is actually the reason why you've never met your real dad. But that was a very, very specific use case and not one that the Marines were expecting to find themselves in. If the army ever ended up duking it out in the folded gap, the Marines would have been busy fighting along the northern edge of the NATO boundaries, especially in and around Norway. But those fights would have required more flexibility and speed than the Apache had to offer at the time.

[00:12:28]Cobras were lighter, simpler designs, and easily adapted to being navalized.

[00:12:33]They didn't take up a bunch of time or space on a Navy ship, and they were pretty cheap all things considered, which was and still is a very important consideration for the Marines and Navy.

[00:12:44]Now, the Marines did expect to have to fight heavier armored units from time to time, but not nearly at the scale the Army did, and they had other things like other tanks and organic fixed wing support that could handle those targets for the most part. For the jarheads, helicopters were just more useful providing support against lighter targets that the grunts were struggling with or providing cover while they conducted shipto-shore movements. But that's only the first layer to our answer. It tells us why we had different models in the 80s, but not in the 2020s.

[00:13:13]Fold the gap isn't really something we have to worry about anymore. And the difference in capabilities of a modern Cobra and a modern Apache is smaller than ever. So, what happens next? Well, the Army did try to push the Apache onto the Marines, and the Marines did actually consider it. It's not necessarily unreasonable to think that you can make a version of the Apache better suited for the Navy and Marines.

[00:13:35]We've done it with tanks, uniforms, fat chicks, and other kinds of helicopters.

[00:13:39]It keeps things cheaper and logistics simpler doing it that way. But between budget arguments, backdoor politics, and bureaucratic red tape, it did not actually manage to happen. One big issue they could never get over was that Apaches were made by Hughes Aircraft at the time. Huies and Cobras, the two choppers used by Marines, were made by Bell Helicopter. That meant that Apaches had no parts commonality with Hueies.

[00:14:03]They use different stuff. You would need totally independent logistics support for both. And spare parts take up a lot of space. Ships do not have a lot of space by nature. So, not only would supporting marine Apaches be more expensive, you wouldn't be able to use a common pool of replacement screws and wires for all your fancy flying machines. This wasn't really an issue for the Army due to not being poor like the Marines and having really all the space they could realistically ever need. The Marines to this day still use the Hueies. So, still using Cobras also still makes sense from that angle. But both of these helicopters are very, very old. Not that that is uh unique. If you look at the American helicopter fleet, and before you get mad at me, yes, I am aware that an original AH1 and an AH1Z are essentially completely different aircraft that just happen to share a silhouette. So, stop typing whatever mean comment you were just doing there.

[00:14:55]I could feel that you were doing that.

[00:14:57]But why did we never come up with a design that both could use like we did with other things? We figured it out with the Blackhawk, so why not an attack helicopter? Well, this is the part of the video where we need to talk about the very different approaches the Army and Marines have when it comes to stuff like this. The Army, traditionally speaking, are the ones that design new things. If a new piece of gear is needed, Army brass push to develop a brand new thing. The Marines traditionally do not do that. They either buy and modify whatever the army just built or they upgrade what they already have. That's not to say the army doesn't upgrade things. They do quite a bit, but they're more open and capable of getting new designs than the devil dogs are. And no, it's not because Marines went to the school of hard knocks and got a degree in common sense while being fluent in sarcasm for you Gen X Facebook vets out there. It's because they're poor and don't have a lot of people. And they're also gay.

[00:15:54]Generally speaking, the Army needs its helicopters to do more things than the Marines need their helicopters to do.

[00:16:00]And one of the biggest things in that realm is to serve as a scout. See, back in the day, the Army used the legendary Kyoa for its flying scouts, but the Marines never adopted any kind of helicopter like that. There wasn't really a capability useful to them.

[00:16:13]Traditionally speaking, Marines don't operate in a large singular area like the Army does. So, they need to recon hundreds of miles at once in all directions is more in the nice to have category, but not in the mission critical category. The army needing their birds to do more meant adding more capabilities to new designs, which meant more stuff that can go wrong. And wrong they did go. So, buckle up now, cuz this is where the story starts to get kind of stupid. See, a big reason why we still use two different kinds of attack helicopters is because the army couldn't manage to build a new one that anyone actually liked. And by that, I mean we have a very long string of spectacular failures in the world of rotary wing design. I won't get into too much into why in this video. But if you want to know the why that is, go check out this other video I made talking about it like right here. But that first failure that we're going to talk about though is the RAH66 Comanche. Think of it as the bastard child of an Apache and an F-117.

[00:17:12]It was supposed to be a stealth helicopter meant to counter Russia's increasing ability to pluck birds out of the sky with missiles and radars.

[00:17:20]Despite this thing being one of the coolest things ever, it was unbelievably expensive. The program went overtime and overbudget numerous times.

[00:17:29]And the design, outside of looking really cool, kind of just sucked. If you fully loaded a Comanche with ammo and fuel, it would struggle to take off even in ideal weather conditions. Plus, with the fall of the Soviet Union, still helicopters suddenly made way less sense. These were designed to lean more into the scouting role over the tank buster role. But with things like drones starting to be invented and fielded, the design made no sense to keep around, and the Marines realistically had no use for an expensive scout helicopter that could occasionally do other things. Back in 2005, the Army tried out the armed reconnaissance helicopter or AR program, which failed even though it was just to modify an existing civilian helicopter that was already on the market. This thing was followed by the armed aerial scout program which didn't even have a platform it focused on. It was literally just a series of very expensive meetings at hotels and convention centers that the army just kind of let die on the vine. Most recently in the late 201 Army launched the future attack reconnaissance aircraft program or now this was going to be the real deal.

[00:18:36]No more half measures. Two finalists, Belle with the 360 Invictus and Sakorski with the Raider X, both flew, both were sexy, and defense reporters could not stop writing about them. We were finally there. We were going to fix the scout helicopter gap that had been open since the Kya got retired. But February of 2024, the Army canled Farra, and they canceled it literally while I was in the middle of writing a script about it at the time, and I'm still mad about that.

[00:19:04]During those four decades of rotary wing fiascos though, the Marines just continued to iterate and upgrade the Cobra, going from the AH1J to the 1T to the 1W, aka the Super Cobra, and then eventually to the AH1Z Viper that we still use today. The funny thing is though, if you look at this problem and this question today, despite all the money spent on upgrades, all the force structure reorganization, and two decades of fighting the Muhammad squad back over in the Middle East, the reason why we still have two different kind of helicopters is basically the same as it was 40 years ago. Modern AH64 Echo Apaches are still optimized for independent proactive attacks. A big portion of that is because they got shoehorned into the role that previous scout helicopters performed because we don't have scout helicopters anymore. So while weapons, optics, and sensors have all been upgraded, the job is essentially the same. Modern Cobras have also not really changed roles. They are still optimized for reactive fighting.

[00:20:05]While they have also been upgraded a very good bit, they still rely on passive targeting methods and carry more flexible payloads on average. Now, if the United States could just stay out of a Middle Eastern war for more than 5 seconds, an argument could be made that if we finally made the pivot over to China, the army would need to come up with a design better suited for that part of the world, much like they did with the new Cheyenne 2. And that could open the door potentially to the chance of attack aviation once again being united between the services like we were back in the good old days before people knew what microplastics were and autism just meant being a little off. A platform designed to fight in the Pacific by the army would naturally be designed in a way that the Marines would probably find a good use for it too. But the role of attack helicopter, as you probably already guessed, is coming into questions. Drones have ruined everything that made war cool and fun to talk about, and we haven't really figured out how these would actually be used in that kind of environment. Both from a capabilities and a vulnerability standpoint. There are some things that an Apache or a Cobra can do that you couldn't do with a few drones, but not that many. And it's up for debate if those niche use cases are worth risking pilots and multi-million dollar airframes. At this point, the idea of a future manned attack helicopter is almost laughable to say out loud. And the only thing companies are coming up with these days are essentially dronified versions of attack helicopters, better suited for the 21st century. So, it may be that eventually, yes, the Marines and Army will use the same attack rotary wing design, but it's also looking like their props won't be a dude in the cockpit or a cockpit to begin with. And eventually after enough time, people will start to think that cockpit is just a rude name to describe your mom. But on that note, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed today's video. Please subscribe and I'll see you in the next