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:
“But with some small portion of real genius and a warm imagination, an author surely may be permitted a little to expand his wings and to wander in the aerial fields of fancy, provided ... that he soar not to such dangerous heights, from whence unplumed he may fall to the ground disgraced, if not disabled from ever rising anymore.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“Along a parabola life like a rocket flies,
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow.”
—Andrei Voznesensky (b. 1933)
“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)