The NH-90 is closer in size to the Sea King than the Lynx/UH-1 …

The 25th in Hawaii is Light too … though they have a “medium” brigade now, I didn’t think the whole division was going that way.

I can’t believe they’d take away the Apaches from the 82nd and 101st …

Re: Part Two

Originally posted by Steve Touchdown
I just want to touch on this just for a minute because it’s kind of important to understand. Today we have about seven different formations in Army aviation depending upon what division, what corps or what National Guard division you’re in. And the study came back to us and said if you want to fight Army aviation as part of the joint force in the air-ground regime that we anticipate to fight with the Future Combat System-equipped force, they recommended to us that it needs to be at the brigade level, it needs to be resourced with two attack battalions of 48 aircraft; a lift battalion of 30 aircraft; a general support battalion of eight command and control helicopters, 12 CH-47s, 12 medevac aircraft; a self-sustaining aircraft support battalion, with its own AVIM unit; and then the Class IV UAV unit.

When you lay that out — and that would be for all our heavy divisions, a very similar design for our three light divisions, except here we would have the light reconnaissance aircraft vice the Apache Attack Helicopter — you see that we’ve standardized our formations between the active component and the Guard component.

So we’re moving to these formations. In fact, the 3rd Infantry Division, when it goes back to Operation Iraqi Freedom, it will go back with this aviation brigade. Its original aviation brigade only had 18 Apaches, 16 Black Hawks, did not have this and did not have this, and that was a heavy division design.

So that’s where we’re going. Next slide.

What we can do now is go to Block III and take our 501 Longbows, 284 between now and 2011, to make full up Block III and place up the other residual 237 to bring us up to 501 Block III Longbows; divest ourselves of the Kiowa Warrior and purchase a new armed reconnaissance helicopter with the cast common cockpit, so it’s digital connectivity, about 368 of them, and recap our A model Apaches for the National Guard.

This all seems quite confusing. First, like I said, basically it sounds like they are only going to have Apaches in the heavy divisions. Then the “three light divisions” (82nd, 101st, and ???? … I thought there were more than 3, more like 5 …) will have a “light reconnaisance aircraft” … but those units already have Apache I thought so are they going to get rid of their full blown attack helicopters?

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me the obvious answer is that the USA will just buy more AH-64D’s …

The whole concept of an armed scout seems to make a lot less sense when they start to get expensive like the Comanche did and when the AH-64D’s have capabilities like the Longbow radar and MMW Hellfire missiles which enable them to find and kill their targets more effectively without having to expose themselves.