The strain is likely to grow more acute as the government depends on helicopter gunships to extend its reach to parts of the country rendered impassable to logistics convoys and even armored vehicles by the rebels' improvised bombs.
Judging from reports of MiG fighter aircraft, helicopter gunships, tanks and Katyusha rockets churning up the spectacular mountainscapes of the country's rugged north-west, the description is fitting.The UN says at least 50,000 people have fled since fighting began in August.
Latin American presidents whose countries once battled narcos with helicopter gunships now openly wonder if prohibition was a mistake; Uruguay has legalised weed.
In retaliation, Israel carried out of a series of attacks on Gaza from helicopter gunships, killing at least 14 people, perhaps five of them Hamas men.The road started to buckle when Palestinian militants, in a concerted ambush on an Israeli army post in Gaza on June 8th, killed four Israeli soldiers.
Secopex estimated it would need two dozen fast gunships.
The long-range strike force of American tanks, gunships and missiles that is building up in Albania, and could easily be reinforced with units still in Germany, probably frightens Serb commanders more than anything else.
But Angola's main opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), says that 1,080 members of the sect were massacred, with helicopter gunships mowing them down.The area where the incident took place, near the country's second city of Huambo, which is UNITA's traditional stronghold south-east of the capital, Luanda, has been cordoned off.
Nor has Syria's army yet unleashed its full array of firepower, which could include helicopter gunships and jet bombers.
I heard numerous eye-witness accounts of attacks on civilian settlements by government bombers and helicopter gunships, government troops and progovernment militias.
AFTER months of huffy hesitation and evasion, Sudan's government at last agreed this week to let some 3,000 UN peacekeepers, replete with helicopter gunships, into its ravaged western region of Darfur.
Getting all sides to agree on what those rules should be is the challenge for the next half-century of the Pacific Age.Next in our special report on the Pacific Age: History: Galleons and gunships (2/9).
