The Boeing-Sikorsky RAh-66 Comanche Stealth Helicopter, page 2

C97,

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Reminds me of GEN Eric Shinseki talking to congress prior to the start of OIF. "We will need 250,000 troops to invade and at least that many to maintain control of the country" the experienced combat veteran said. And then the Secretary of Defense says "you are wrong - this is what we'll do" - and look where we are nearly 4 years later.
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SEN. LEVIN: General Shinseki, could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?

GEN. SHINSEKI: In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders' exact requirements. But I think --

SEN. LEVIN: How about a range?

GEN. SHINSEKI: I would say that what's been mobilized to this point -- something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground- force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.
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en.wikipedia.org...

What A Piker.

Not least because he didn't make sure that Franks and Zinni or anyone else _backed_ his 'uhh well, uhhhh I guess I would have to rely on the combat commanders but uhhh about what we've got uhhhh mobilized?' statements. Critics are like hyenas. Roar the truth like a lion and they will wait and see how things play out with slitted eyes. Show uncertainty and weakness and they attack you regardless of proof of righteousness 'after the fact'.

And 'Good ol' Ric' was about as authoritatively READY TO SPEAK HIS WILL AS MUCH AS HIS MIND as a third grader giving his first book report.

Which I would guess why all his 'buddies' took one big step back and let him stand alone. In public.

NONE OF WHICH EXCUSES THE **NEXT THREE YEARS** as being anything more than 'sounds like typical military CYA' for not speaking up as the SOLE experts in the field during dozens of Congressional reviews /after/ the invasion. Just like Vietnam, "Yessir-yessir three bags full sir!" translates to continuing tactical mistakes as COMMAND DECISIONS which amounts to no less than a dereliction of duty to protect those with whom 'shoulder to shoulder we soldier' the battle is _supposed_ to really be about. On a day to day basis of least casualties and most gains.

Never let it be said that a general, right or wrong, will err to the side of his FORCE SECURITIES SAKE in falling on his political 'sword' if a terrorist's knife can take off a few private's head instead!

Conversely, the fact that (in another repeat of Vietnam) that the military has insisted on a 'lazy kind of war' in which rotations home guarantee that just as your people are getting good after a year of experience, they start to slack off on the 'short' basis of non-heroics is equally stupid. Because instead of compressing down until they are just simply too mean to be bleeped with as a MASSED force drawn from the worthless garrison theaters of Korea and no-help-here NATO, they instead go into and out of theater with an expectation of a tour based duty cycle rather than a WAR based 'them or us' definition of victory-as-survival before they are /allowed/ to come home. Nothing motivates you to find terrorists like the certainty that every idiot they kill, yours or theirs, amounts to another 6 months before the mission is considered done.

Which shortfalls in troops commited led to the PURELY MILITARY decision to play whackamole with force shifts between Anbar, the Triangle and the Capital. Something which itself screams out 'fire brigade mentality' of a running scratch force = not enough TOTAL FORCE.

_As Exploitable Weakness And Lack Of Commitment To Our Enemies_.

With all the above condemning the 'military approach' **do not** pull the political card on me. Because if you're the only ones allowed to say what you need and how you will use it, you had jolly well better SPEAK UP when you don't have enough of either to win. And NOBODY stood up to the CMIC and said: "No, he is _wrong_. And I am willing to put my career on the line to be the first not the last to say so in front of a TV Camera."

It is the generals who are the cowardly political animals because nobody says nothin' until they are safely retired and the war is _LOST_. If there is more honor among the political thieves who run this nation than the flag ranks of the U.S. military who nominally protect only themselves.

Why do even attempt to use them as your model of military virtue?

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You use tanks and conventional RT to channelize with direct fire and mines and then you shoot MLRS or ATACMS and take out entire regimental columns AFTER 'the breakout' into a controlled, cellular, defensive cordon.
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Someone forgot to tell the Iraqi insurgency and Taliban that's how we fight. Although this is part of recent doctrine, no foe that we have faced in recent memory has been dumb enough to really allow themselves to be put into this position. Much like we study theirs, they study ours.
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The Comanche was designed in a European Hotwar climate where the combination of large conventional forces and high probability nuclear release in weather, IADS and counterforce (rocket+SWO attacks on MOBs) conditions unsuitable to fixed wing airpower meant that you had to do more with less as justification of the 'final 10 percent' pursuit of capability for it's own sake. Don't BS me with the notion that you didn't realize this was the relevant context I was speaking to because it is the context which LHX was formulated with, back when Ronnie Raygun was in office.

Having said that, the ability to realize how you are about to be screwed and being possessed of the ability to prevent it from happening ARE NOT the same thing.

Whether that be as a GSFG armor force _on the attack_ and thus exposed to all manner of observation and fires. Or an unlawful combatant whose keys to mobility, weaponry and C2 are all held by his conqueror. As is the case in Iraq.

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These days, matters are even worse because the only way for a helo to be safe is to fly high and /very/ fast (250-300 knots) while DROPPING ordnance into target zones that may well have multistory builtup on 2 or 3 sides.
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Not according to the military helicopter pilots I know (father, sister, uncle). You must constantly change airspeed and altitude - and mission dictates some of the other factors.
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And they are undoubtedly, 'institutional men' whose Key West defacto mentality if not mendacity in endorsing 'the way -I- fight' deprives them of a balanced intuit into how they MIGHT as a functionally achieve the same mission, better, as much as how they SHOULD. Tell us, have any one of your annointed relations taken a ride in a UAV shelter or the backseat of a Marine F-18D to even /comment/ on 'my what a nice view you have up here'? What about an OV-10D? A Mohawk? A P-47?

I didn't think so.

No crossdiscipline experience = NO DAMN RIGHT TO JUDGE how 'well suited' their particular modeal is to any let alone the current situation. Because many platforms can do the same job but thanks to the idiocy of service turf as a budgetary implement of divisions of power only ONE weapons system approach is 'assigned' to a given services' combat arm.

How many helicopters have been shot down in Iraq? (87) How many fast jets? (13) How often has a fast jet been blown away by an 'improvised' AHM or an RPG while operating below 150ft? (0) How many times has a fast jet been downed by an old man and his Carcano rifle so that the crew AND their 'latest and greatest' airframe could be paraded around downtown Baghdad? (0) How long has it been since the USAr had 'real experience' with armed fixed wing CAS again? (40 years)

Asking someone in love with their uniformed union job whether their service and this nation would be better off with an alternative approach to doing it is like the farmer asking the fox to define what a chicken is. 'Sure, just let me inside the hutch to see if I can find one for you...' They have no reason to look for an alternative and so they will never find one.

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Only an idiot points his nose at the ground to deliver FFAR and ATGW when the climbout is going to drop him back to 70-90 knots and a 'shoot me I'm stupid' look up his tailrotor. As an alternative to 'skimming the rooftops' while every mook with a slingshot fires at him.
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Agreed - I've never seen or heard of this actually being done (since Vietnam), and can't really think of a scenario when it would be in modern times.
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I guess you never went to The Mog where strafe and rocket attacks were all 'nose over and dddddoooowwn we go!' with Littlebirds and Snakes. Indeed, when 5 Apaches got all shot up and the Marines had to ride to the rescue on the OPENING DAY of Shah-i-Kot, I guess nobody put their nose below the ridgeline to fire a shot for fear of losing altitude or airspeed? How about OIF when 32 Apaches over Najaf suffered 80% attrition of their mission force? Did they also /refuse to shoot back at the trashfire/ because it would mean pointing the nose down to get at the source?

Tell me again, what /was/ the ratio of expenditure between 70mm, 30mm and AGM-114 in the OEF/OIF Apache and Cobra units again? 100:1? 1,000:1?

Why is it that the 101st Airborne in AfG counts the 2.75" as being among their top ten of 'oopsy!' frat fraggings?

If you want to properly handle a trashfire threat, you PE DROP ON IT FROM ABOVE their weapons floor so the ballistics ensures a good vertical hit and the lack of defensive engagement lets you do your job unpuckered.

As soon as you lose that option, you had bloody well better be able to both exploit high dive velocities and a constant forward propulsion vector on climbout. Which is impossible on a conventional helo, where RBS roll over happens above 170-180 knots. And climbout will bleed 10 knots a second as the disk can't stay level with the horizon to push while tilting the fuselage to slant the velocity vector forward.

Furthermore, ALL helos share line of sight with their enemies to both acquire, designate and fire upon small/cluttered targets in COIN wars, not least because ground designators/markers for SALH weapons are not often available and occasionally outright dangerous to mark with due to the sheer unpredictability of guerilla attacks. Even as the need to contain scatter with cheap ballistic weapons requires a short, hard, slant over an own-force and collateral rich target environments which -begs- the BHD scenario of troops in trouble having to run save their saviors.

And because they do all this with weapons systems that fire forward rather than down off a platform highly unsuited to operations above 3,000ft, helicopters are ALWAYS in the threat envelope of the LEAST CAPABLE (cheapest and most dense) of enemy systems. So when they are done with their pathetic gun or rocket run, the nature of their rotor and weapons systems -guarantees- that they will either be running at full speed and lower through often by miles of linear overflight.

Engineering Pragmatics and certainly /Physics/ haven't changed from Vietnam to the Present Day Crusader. The sad part is, neither has the Army.

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Yet that is effectively the force model that the RAH-66 /by configuration/ was designed to play at. And as such, it is no better than the Snake or the the Indian or the ARH which are themselves completely worthless in the modern environment.
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Not really. The Comanche was intended to be more of a heavily armed replacement for the OH-58 - which had performed extremely well in it's role since Vietnam but was badly in need of replacement. The recon/observation role is something that neither the Apache nor the Cobra are really equipped to do.
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No. Exactly that. I said _force model_.

When you spot for or 'escort' for a bunch of helpless tank killers doing NOE or Low flight to 'avoid detection' as a function of scooting between hides to an ambush; you don't gain by having a compound/rigid rotor configuration to allow for a 250 knot capability on your scout because the FRIENDLY forces you are supporting are so damn slow and their effective weapons ranges so damn short that you can do the 'MMS+MLMS as AHIP equivalent' /as enabled by stealth alone/.

Most particularly when the threat is an OMG breaking out of Fulda and buying 50-100 tanks with one or two LO chopper losses may be a practical trade.

However; when that configuration is taken to the real world where the threat is deep, all optical and so dense that trashfire is coming from 10-20 muzzle sources at once, even as you are looking at a force structure model where the Cobra (and it's worthless teeter-rotor) is long gone and the Hellfire/Apache system _remains_ too expensive to indulge in lob-shotting with a GPS kit, the Comanche is no longer a night-ninja or one which can 'standoff' and still see a high signature threat coming towards it. Rather it is one helo hunting twenty or more goats hidden behind buildings or in crowds of biped sheep, right under it's rotor disk.

And thus just like any other VISUAL=Mk.1 Ball conventional helo platform when it comes to close in weapons delivery.

What's more, we would have HAD TO play with the Comanche as a direct CAS platform because it would have effectively been the replacement attack-not-scout helo, thanks to only about half the Apaches getting the full-D 701 engines + R&M upgrades. Which means that an overweight, underpowered, RAH-66 is _risking VLO technologies_ to some git with a 100 dollar rifle.

The irony here being that when jetnoise is heard, nobody looks up and thinks "Ooooh, the sound of freedom from persecution!" They hunker down and bow their heads with the notion "Daaaaaamn, I'd better not do anything stupid because Big Brother is watching _and I can't touch him that high and fast_."

Not so with rotary wing aviation. Rotary wing aviation is always a temptation to engage a weak, slow, low target.

There have been times when helicopters have been reduced to skulking behind buildings _in Baghdad_, solely because they are afraid to skyline themselves when they 'at least know who owns this structure'. Such is nothing if not an indictment of the performance, sensor orientation and weapons bias of the low-slow shooter.

KPl.