I would love to see the CABs adopt a workout cycle more akin to you guys going to the MEU decks for months prior to and not trying what we normally do of “maintain everything at all times” that results in maintaining almost nothing. The unpredictable nature of deployments though just make that impossible. Army Force Gen cycles are written entirely for ground units and the CAB organic to a division is always left out somewhere in space to meet other deployment readiness requirements or just produce a task force to help support training/CTCs/etc.
With regards to FVL, most of us don’t believe the thing will fly for more than a year before somebody bellies one doing traffic patterns for progression, and suddenly an AWR is written to pin the gear down and pull a CB so they stay that way. One guy craps his pants… but anybody watching Ukraine right now validating some of the COAs on the distance at which your security requirement forces you to back off realizes we have to get faster longer legs or we simply cannot be used in LSCO. Our aircraft are too complex and maintenance intensive to simply live with the ground elements and we have too much ass to be flexible and mobile. The TAA will be too far for a 120-140kt platform to actually affect anything in the fight.
ARSOA on the other hand will have no issue with this aircraft. In a lot of ways as long as it still has some useful ACL after they bolt all the mission equipment to it, it will finally get the 60s back into the show. Likewise if CSAR gets into this there may actually be options for recovery not limited by an overweight 60 airframe trying to do a 53 job.
Unless Army Aviation is far worse than I thought, they’ll be fine.
Most of the original V-22 community was CH-46E guys—the biggest knuckle-draggers in the Wing. I can say that because I was one.
Big Army must think it can handle the future, since it bought the tiltrotor. If it doesn’t use that capability, it’d better be prepared for irrelevance, since practically no Pacific islands are H-60 range apart.
If anything, I worry about ARSOC acceptance. They’re so used to landing on the X next to mud huts that they may not be ready for big boy wars that need something bigger than a Little Bird.
