Jura The idiot
General
this one is interesting:
FLRAA will go to select Guard units ahead of most of the regular Army, Gen. McConville said. That's a far cry from past conflicts over helicopters.
FLRAA will go to select Guard units ahead of most of the regular Army, Gen. McConville said. That's a far cry from past conflicts over helicopters.
size limit reached“High priority” will get the for the UH-60 Black Hawk at about the same time as elite active-duty formations, promised this week. That would modernize at least some Guard units ahead of the majority of the regular Army. It’s a dramatic turnaround from three years ago, when Army leaders and the Guard community were over .
“As far the , we see that being fielded initially to have those units that have forced- or early-entry type missions, like the 101st Airborne Division, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the 82nd Airborne Division,” told the here, naming three of the Army’s most elite and storied formations. “We also see them being fielded to the National Guard in units with a high priority early on as we go forward.”
Not Just FLRAA
It’s not just FLRAA that’ll go to the Guard, McConville told reporters after his remarks to the conference. The Army’s working on lots of and for future , he said, and “we’re going to put some of these new capabilities into the Guard up front, which is a little different than we have done in the past.”
There’s already a vigorous program to modernize Guard aviation, the assistant director of the Army Guard told the conference. All the Guard’s have been upgraded to the CH-47F Block I standard, said. The Guard’s UH-60L “Lima” Black Hawks will be upgraded to the UH-60V “Victor” model, which has come under some criticism but which Davis said is actually “better than the [regular Army’s UH-60M] ‘Mikes’ in a lot of ways.” And the Guard will begin replacing its AH-64D Apaches with the latest model in 2022, with all four Guard Apache battalions upgraded by the end of 2026.
But those are all new models of old aircraft that entered service in the Cold War. FLRAA, by contrast, will be an all-new design — not even a conventional helicopter, but either a or a — developed under the Future Vertical Lift program. What about giving the Guard early access to the Army’s other new FVL aircraft, the (FARA)?
“We’ll take a look at that,” McConville said.
Why different answers on different aircraft? McConville didn’t say. The simplest explanation is that the Guard already has plenty of UH-60 Black Hawks, which is the aircraft FLRAA would replace in assault, transport, cargo, and . The Guard doesn’t currently have scout helicopter units, which is where FARA would go.
Strictly speaking, the regular Army doesn’t have any scout helicopters either. Both active and Guard units retired their aging OH-58D Kiowa Warriors years ago without buying a new recon aircraft to replace it. But the regular Army does have scout units, called Heavy Attack Reconnaissance Squadrons, which try to fill the recon role with — many of which were taken from the Guard as part of the bitterly controversial .
Since the heavily armed and armored Apache was never designed to be a scout, it’s not a particularly good one, which is why the Army’s made developing a new thoroughbred scout its top aviation priority. That’s FARA, the Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft, which . (That potentially frees the gunships to go back to the Guard, though I haven’t heard anyone in the Army say they will).
Since the Guard doesn’t have any HAR squadrons, it’s unlikely to get FARA — unless the Army decides the Guard now needs recon units. That’s entirely possible as part of an ongoing top-to-bottom look at for future multi-domain operations. The Army’s senior futurist, Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, has publicly said some active units will need to move into the reserve component and some Reserve and Guard units will move into the active force.
...
