Yarmouk Traffic Circle Takes a Beating
This is a bit old but quite good footage worth talking about…
The Yarmouk Traffic Circle was a particularly bad location in Mosul when I was there in 2004-2005, often the site of some bad ambushes by the bad guys as well as IEDs. In this video, special operations aviation is doing gun and rocket runs on targets in the area. You’ll notice that they have a pattern to their runs: miniguns, cannon, then rockets.
The DAP is the brainchild of famed Nightstalker Cliff Walcott, who died in Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia. Up until that point, the only attack helicopters used by the 160 Special Operations Aviation Regiment were AH-6 Littlebirds, armed with 7.62mm miniguns and 2.75″ rockets. While agile and capable, the AH-6s don’t have the range nor the payload for sustained fire support missions, so operations that required heavier support relied on coordinating with conventional AH-64 Apache elements. The compartmentalized nature of special operations often made this difficult, so it was determined that an “intermediate level” attack capability for the 160th was required. The DAP was born out of this requirement by taking an MH-60, special operations variant of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, and fitting it for attack purposes.
MH-60s normally mount 7.62mm miniguns on door mounts to provide defensive fire when ferrying troops to and from targets. Because the DAPs mission is purely offensive, the miniguns are locked forward firing and hard points are mounted to the fuselage allowing a wide variety of munitions. The most common configuration is large 2.75″ rocket pods (larger than the ones carried by the AH-6) and a 30mm chain gun (the same used on the Apache gunship). This is what is seen in the video with the forward mounted miniguns roaring onto the target followed by the 30mm chaingun and rockets. DAPs can also mount Hellfire laser guided missiles for longer range precision standoff capability as well as Stinger missiles for anti-aircraft needs.
There’s a similar video out there of DAPs doing runs near the MAF (Mosul Airfield) at “Gilligan’s Island.” There aren’t any active targets in that video – it’s more a series of practice runs or a “show of force” on the south side of the runway in a wide open area bad guys liked to setup mortars in.