"But it doesn't understand how to read the situation. "The UAV will go and do what you tell it to do," he said. He now heads the Army's Objective Force Task Force. "UAVs don't have peripheral vision," said Riggs, a combat helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War with more than 4,000 cockpit hours. A separate infrared targeting system is capable of performing an "automated scan" of the battlefield that immediately enables the pilot and ground commanders to tell a Soviet-made T-72 tank from an American M1-A1. They will be able to swivel from side to side simply by moving their heads. Pilots will fly Comanche looking through a night-vision infrared system contained in their flight helmets. With 37 antennas built into its radar absorbing skin, Comanche can either use its reconnaissance data to designate targets for other aircraft, such as its muscular older brother, the Apache gunship, or fire on targets itself with its own radar-guided Hellfire missiles. It has infrared imaging that is so sensitive pilots not only can see power lines in the dead of night but they can also determine which ones are hot. Indeed, Comanche is more like a flying data center than a helicopter gunship, designed to receive battlefield information from satellites, aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and refine it with its own sophisticated sensors at 150 feet instead of 15,000. The case Riggs makes for Comanche as a "transformational" system is considered far stronger by the Rumsfeld coterie. Rumsfeld killed the Crusader earlier this year, deriding the system as a 40-ton relic of another era. Riggs and other Army advocates of Comanche seem confident that the world's most sophisticated combat helicopter, which has more lines of software code than even the F-22, will not be joining the service's Crusader mobile howitzer on the ash heap of canceled programs. The V-22 is far more troubled, with a rigorous flight test program underway to determine whether its tilt-rotor technology, which enables the Osprey to take off and land like a helicopter but fly with the speed and range of an airplane, is safe. The three aircraft systems together would cost $164 billion over the next 20 years.įew expect the F-22 to be killed, but analysts inside and outside the Pentagon say the Defense Acquisition Board could cut production of the plane from 339 to 180 units. Two other long-delayed and hugely expensive weapons programs - the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter and the Marine Corp's V-22 tilt-rotor Osprey - fall in the same make-or-break category, giving Rumsfeld an opportunity to redirect tens of billions of dollars to new programs such as unmanned aerial vehicles, intelligence satellites, missile defense networks and smarter smart bombs. Taxpayers have already sunk $5 billion into the program. Rumsfeld and his advisers consider more "transformational" technologies. Among its options: clear Comanche for final production, possibly at a rate below the 1,213 aircraft the Army wants, or kill it to free up money for what Defense Secretary Donald H. The helicopter program has been restructured five times since 1983 and its engineering and manufacturing development costs have risen 109 percent in the past year alone as a part of a last-ditch plan to save it from oblivion.Ĭomanche's final test is expected in September at a meeting of the Defense Acquisition Board. It was the latest, albeit minor, setback for Comanche, a $48 billion program that has experienced so many problems since its inception in the thick of the Cold War that it has become synonymous with Pentagon ineptitude at procuring new weapon systems. "The airplane is hard down and will not be flying today," Riggs said with obvious frustration, relaying the message to an entourage of congressional staffers and reporters who had flown from Washington with him. Riggs was set to watch the Army's new stealth helicopter, the RH-66 Comanche, zoom around Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.'s flight test range on the edge of the Everglades when an aide whispered the bad news in his ear: an engine malfunction had grounded the aircraft.
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