U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopter Crews Conduct Night Air Assault Drills With South Korea.

U.S. Army aviation crews from the 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade conducted combined day and night air assault training with the Republic of Korea Army forces near Seoul on February 5, 2026. The exercise reflects how quickly U.S. and allied forces may need to move combat power in a Korean Peninsula crisis where warning time can be extremely short.

U.S. Army aviation crews from the 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade pushed into combined day and night air assault training on February 5, 2026, operating from Sungnam (Seoul Air Base) alongside Republic of Korea Army partners and special operations elements. The drill, highlighted by the brigade in its official release, is the kind of high-friction rehearsal that matters on the Korean Peninsula, where warning time can be measured in minutes. In that environment, the first tactical advantage often goes to the side that can move forces faster, in darkness, under radio silence, and into confined landing zones carved out of steep terrain and dense urban sprawl.
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U.S. Army UH-60 Black Hawk crews from 2-2 Aviation Regiment train a combined night air assault with the ROK Army near Seoul, practicing rapid troop insertions and landing zone control (Picture source: U.S. DoW).

The aircraft at the center of these drills is best assessed as the UH-60 Black Hawk family, the U.S. Army’s standard assault utility helicopter. In Korea, that increasingly means the UH-60M configuration, recognizable by its modernized avionics suite and improved propulsion that gives crews better hot-and-high margins and more usable power for hover work with troops and equipment. In practical terms, a Black Hawk can move an 11-soldier squad plus crew, carry meaningful internal cargo, and sling heavy external loads that can approach the 9,000-pound class depending on model and conditions, all while retaining the agility to thread valleys and ridge lines at low level.

Night air assault is not simply day flight with goggles. It is a combined arms problem compressed into a few minutes: route selection that avoids known air defense threats, terrain masking, disciplined formation flying, and the choreography of landing zone control, fast onload and offload, and immediate extraction before the enemy can range artillery or saturate the area with small drones. The Black Hawk’s cockpit and navigation architecture, paired with night vision goggle operations, is designed for that tempo, and its cabin is built for violent transitions from cruise to hover to dust-off. Door-mounted 7.62 mm machine guns are a baseline defensive fit, but survivability in this environment is ultimately about tactics, signatures, and timing more than raw firepower.

For 2nd Battalion, 2nd Aviation Regiment, those tactics are not an abstract training requirement but the unit’s core missions. The battalion’s wartime task is to transition rapidly to combat and execute air assault and general support aviation in direct support of the 2nd Infantry Division and Combined Forces Command. That translates to moving infantry and special operations teams, evacuating casualties under pressure, pushing ammunition and water forward when roads are threatened, and sustaining mission command when ground maneuver forces are dispersed. The same crews that practice night insertions also build maritime and joint muscle memory, expanding operational options along Korea’s coastlines and reinforcing flexibility across domains.

The 2nd Infantry Division/ROK-U.S. Combined Division is the U.S. Army’s last permanently forward-stationed division, tasked to deter aggression and, if deterrence fails, to fight immediately in defense of the Republic of Korea. The combined division construct, activated in 2015 with the partnered ROK 16th Mechanized Brigade, is meant to make that fight less improvisational by baking combined procedures into everyday readiness rather than treating interoperability as an annual exercise goal. At the theater level, the combined command framework is built around deterring aggression and, if necessary, defending South Korea to maintain stability in Northeast Asia.

Training alongside the ROK Army is a cooperation test. The first hours of any contingency would demand bilingual mission command, shared landing zone marking standards, compatible communications plans, and a common understanding of how to integrate aviation with fires and ground maneuver without fratricide. A combined night air assault also tests the alliance where it is most fragile: in the seams between units, in the handoff from special reconnaissance to assault, and in the real-time deconfliction of aircraft, artillery, and airspace. Analysts who tracked the creation of the combined division argued that the structure signals operational trust and is designed to make combined operations work from the bottom up, not just on paper.

The UH-60 Black Hawk remains the workhorse because it closes a specific tactical gap: it can put combat power precisely where roads cannot, and it can do it repeatedly, in poor weather, at night, with a footprint small enough to survive inside a dense threat envelope. That is why the U.S. Army continues to emphasize sustainment and modernization of the UH-60M to ensure crews can rely on it for decades. In Korea, the message is simpler: the alliance is rehearsing the most dangerous missions now, so it does not have to invent them later.