George Z. Bush wrote:
"Garrison Hilliard" wrote in message
...

(Snip)

The Comanche program was started in 1983 and had survived many
reviews. Under a restructuring worked out in 2002, a decision on
going ahead with initial low-rate production was to be made in 2007,
with the first Comanches delivered to the Army in 2009 and full-rate
production to begin in 2010.

Since this Reagan era DOD project survived the Reagan DOD
evaluations, and those of Daddy Bush, and those of Bill Clinton, we
now have arrived at the present situation, with our present DOD
deciding that the project was unworthy of completion and not worth
spending any more money on. Why do I have that uneasy feeling that
brain surgery is about to be done by our neighborhood podiatrist? Why
do I feel that they'd rather spend the money on some other project,
like Star Wars, that they'd like rather than this one that the Army
has said all along that it needs?

The Army aviaiton community has said so all along. But Army aviation's
credibility is not what it once was. It's a little hard to claim, with a
stright face anyway, that the Army's next-generation scout helo needs
extensive and expensive radar-frequency stealth when Apache units in
Afghanistan and Iraq are getting rocked by optically-aimed guns and IR
MANPADS. Granted they may not have done as badly as press reports suggest,
but these wars showed that the idea odf the deep penetration striek by
helicopters independant of ground forces was probably not a viable option.
And that was what Commanche was designed around. That level of stelath was
only needed to penetrate an enemy's sophisitcated battlefield air defenses
and strike deep into their rear area, where the radar SAMs would live.

It's also hard to understand why a scout needs an armament that's only
slightly lighter than the attack helo it's supposedly scouting for, or why
you need a scout at all when the attack helos have potent surveillance
radars like Longbow.

Commanche may have been the right answer for fighting in the 1990s against a
Soviet force with integrated air deffenses even with its mobile armored
units (but I won't bet on it). But the mid 1990s, it was obviously the
wrong answer. Likely some sort of replacement was needed, but Commanche was
way too much helo for the job.

--
Tom Schoene Replace "invalid" with "net" to e-mail
"If brave men and women never died, there would be nothing
special about bravery." -- Andy Rooney (attributed)