Air Force Community - Air Force Times

Combat rescue helo mess is a disservice to troops

If you’re in a combat search-and-rescue outfit wondering when you’ll get a new helicopter, you’ve been betrayed. The Pentagon, with its bloated acquisitions bureaucracy, has let you down.

To replace 104 aging HH-60G Pave Hawks, the Air Force two years ago launched a competition for a new helicopter in its CSAR-X program.

Air Combat Command boss Gen. Ronald Keys told me May 2 that the HH-60G is “not stable enough.” The Air Force wants 141 CSAR-X helicopters. “I need them yesterday,” Keys said.

But Keys won’t choose the new helicopter. “I’ve recused myself from command influence,” he said. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley won’t select the new helicopter, either. The way things work now, that’s not his job.

Over the years, we’ve created a system in Washington that has strangled itself in legalistic requirements and procedures. We’ve turned “acquisitions” into a career field and a bureaucracy all its own, staffed by good people, to be sure, but forever running a treadmill, rarely reaching any destination.

CSAR-X should have been simple. We never needed recusals, legalisms or bureaucracy.

Only one helicopter today can properly perform an Air Force-type combat rescue mission. It’s the European-designed EH-101, often described as the US101 in marketing documents and known as the Merlin in British service, where it has proven itself in combat. Its VH-71A version has been picked as the next “Marine One” presidential helicopter. The 23 VH-71As will be final-assembled and undergo systems integration by American workers at American plants.

If common sense trumped legalistic and bureaucratic concerns, the Air Force would buy 141 EH-101s, call them HH-71Bs and get on with it. We could have HH-71Bs in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

Instead, the service held the CSAR-X competition. Last November, acquisitions folk selected the HH-47 Chinook over the EH-101 or the also-ran S-92. Hoping to put a party dress on a pig, some writers, including me, struggled for good things to say about the Chinook, which is combat proven in other missions.

But Loren Thompson, analyst at the Lexington Institute, wrote in a paper that the Chinook is too loud, generates too much dust, heat and downwash, and has other flaws. Observers say the S-92, which is adequate for civilian rescue duty, was never a serious contender for combat.

After contractors for the EH-101 and S-92 protested and the Government Accountability Office upheld them, the Air Force is reviving the CSAR-X competition. Now, the same three helicopters will compete again. A senior aerospace executive told me that when a winner is chosen again, we’ll see protests again.

Our CSAR-X paralysis is a metaphor for Moseley’s top priority, a new tanker. The capabilities of the world’s only two possible tankers are well known. The Air Force could choose one in an instant by deciding which capabilities it wants. Yet the acquisitions bureaucracy has been grappling with a new tanker for a decade, and we are still prancing around at the starting gate.

The Pentagon acquisitions system doesn’t support the troops. It’s broken. And right now our prospects for a new combat rescue helicopter are a shambles. We must do better than this.

The writer, an Air Force veteran, lives in Oakton, Va. He is the author of “Air Combat,” a history of fighter pilots. His e-mail address is robert.f.dorr@cox.net.