Don't minimize the threat in Afghanistan. The bad guys were nervy if
not sophisticated, and if they were dug-in someplace you had to go,
they were a threat. (The MH-47s brought down around Roberts' Ridge
prove that.)

No-one ever plans to go toe-to-toe with air defenses ('Case you didn't
know, the red coat thing doesn't work well). The idea is evade 'em
first, jam 'em second, and then take the hit as a last resort. Apaches
are good at evading and taking the hit - they don't have good jammers
yet. The Comanche was biased toward evading the threat - maybe too
much so.

As to the wonderful '101 - yes indeed it is wider. The mystery box of
course could fit nothing else, even though the '92 was modular and
already took two easy stretches. You could match the length of the '92
to the 101 and have a more crashworthy box without fuel under the
floor. All the PRV solutions apparently provide more headroom for PJs
to work - let's see if the requirement calls for some other magic
dimension.

I agree you want to refuel at mountain elevations - but you should look
at the full requirement, not find pockets that steer the choice
offshore. The VXX decision found the one pocket and just ignored a
generation of safety design progress, and 40+ years of US government
security regulations.

Agreed, 60's have less room and less gas in them than HH-3Es and Pave
Lows. The things were still able to get to people down in Iraq and
Kosovo. They also deploy rapidly on C-5s and C-17s without removing
the transmission, and they have the ballistic tolerance of a Black
Hawk, so they're not a total mismatch. Bigger will be better, but not
at the expense of superior ballistic tolerance, lower operating and
support costs, and all that other stuff the US military usually says it
wants.

That TERPROM-type solution assumes you've got your digital elevation
map for every place you're going to fly. You could also buy a terrain
following/terrain avoidance radar and digital map already integrated on
the MH-60K/MH-47E/CV-22, albeit for more bucks. The tradeoffs are to
be determined, but the stored terrain solution doesn't do it all.

I suspect any of the candidate aiframes will be compatible with the
MEP, but I still think it's a mistake to buy someone else's problem
(like the 101) to show how much you like them. (No one will say just
what has to be done to fix the 101 so it doesn't flatten again like
that Merlin in the UK.) Likewise, it is to our best interest to have a
viable helicopter industry, not a build-to-print shop for expensive
European engineering.

HW