Although sometimes used to describe armed helicopters, the term aerial rocket artillery (abbreviated ARA, also called aerial artillery) properly refers to armed helicopter units that were part of (organic to) the division artillery of the United States Army’s two airmobile divisions during the Vietnam War. Controlled by division artillery and not the aviation group, the 2nd Battalion, 20th Artillery, 1st Cavalry Division and the 4th Battalion, 77th Artillery, 101st Airborne Division, along with Battery F, 79th Artillery, 1st Cavalry Division, were the only ARA units fielded during that conflict. The ARA concept disappeared from Army aviation by the mid-1970s, replaced with more generic attack aviation units.
Read more about Aerial Rocket Artillery: Beginnings, Organization and Equipment, Missions, Notable Achievements, Further Development
Famous quotes containing the words aerial, rocket and/or artillery:
“Every year lays more earth upon us, which weighs us down from aerial regions, till we go under the earth at last.”
—E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)
“A rocket is a reed that thinks brilliantly.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)