Lockheed Martin is involved – “US-101”. Engines and other items are from? Two big F-35 customers and allies in Iraq.
Why not play a bit competition with Sikorsky, when it becomes overconfident in pricing?! The main winner is? 😉

Sure Lockheed Martin is involved, but it’s merely rebadging the EH-101 and making parts of it the U.S. That’s just one example. The U.S. military and government are also buying complete systems from abroad, and the VX competition demonstrated that the major defense contractors are now multinational in buying components. Companies like Lockheed or BAE or EADS are outgrowing national borders, with shareholders coming from all over the world.

f) The US has an incredibly strong leveraging political position, in a scale that has never been seen in the world never seen before.

[]s Hammer

Agree with what you wrote, but this one is something of an overstatement. For example, as close as the Aussies are to the U.S., they don’t buy all American. Not many countries do, preferring to pick and choose among different manufacturers. And some countries are understandably concerned about the potential downside of the U.S. imposing an embargo when some portion of the unpredictable American electorate gets in a rage about something they see in the newspapers.

Heck, even the U.S. military doesn’t buy all-American. How much leverage can we have if we can’t even persuade our Navy to pick a U.S. helicopter for the president to ride around in?

The worst is a tough category, since a lot of war movies have been made with cut-rate aerial scenes. Who can forget the movies or TV shows where you see the actor in a tight shot of a cockpit, pretending to line up on an enemy’s tail for the killshot, then they cut to stock gun-camera footage from WW2 of an airplane losing a wing or blowing up in mid-air?

The best aerial footage I’ve seen was in the 1970s movie “The Great Waldo Pepper”, which was all about a barnstorming pilot in the 1920s who had missed out on flying combat in WW1 and spends the movie proving to himself that he could have been an ace if only he had been given the chance (at least, that’s what I thought it was supposed to be about).

The ‘Battle of Britain’ from the 1970s also had some great aerial scenes.

The U.S. army and marines appear to have found them useful in Vietnam, the Gulf, Panama, and elsewhere. Sometimes they get shot down. So what? Sometimes tanks or armored vehicles get blown up. Sometimes soldiers get shot or blown up. And sometimes you lose some helicopters. That Apaches or Cobras aren’t utterly invulnerable doesn’t mean they’re useless on the battlefield.

According to recent press accounts I’ve seen, the MH2000 is just about dead. So is that OH. You have to ask, why develop a light attack helicopter when you know that you won’t need more than a couple of hundred and can’t export it?

Still, good luck getting funding- this won’t come cheap.

Based on recent history, going in you have to figure that any system like this will become a huge budget drain over a couple of decades. Pile up the dollar bills, put a match to them. If there’s a real need for it, maybe that’s worth it. But if there isn’t a clear, continually demonstrable need for this ‘interim’ bomber, it’s going to be a big fight all the way.

Can’t deny that until now they have built nothing worth the money, except the Shin Meiwa flying boats. Too bad that thing didn’t have any commercial success. Has a lot to do with ignorance. USCG could really use it, fire fighters could us it, countries like Indonesia could use it, but somehow they think that amphibs are uncool just because the U.S. forces don’t fly them any more.

I like the look of flying boats, but would they justify their cost to the USCG? You’d have to match the disadvantages of the aircraft against the number of times the USCG has an SAR situation beyond helicopter range in seas calm enough to land the thing. The other feature of flying boats is being able to use waterways as landing fields, but although that’s got a high and undeniable cool factor, that doesn’t seem like much of a practical need for the CG at this stage.

Actually, NATO is only taking care of the Kabul area. The rest is American country, in a number of cases actually supporting other warlords than Warlord-Elect Karzai. . . .

It would be better to organise an at least somewhat central government before going shopping for arms.

NATO is planning on expanding operations into the entire country by 2006. And the two operations will merge, or at least they’re supposed to merge, as time passes. Whether this makes any difference is a different point. A lot depends on improving the capabilities of the Afghan army.