Should the US Army have procured the RAH-66 Comanche?

[Kat Tsun]

Kat tsun, TF Hawk was a logistics disaster and they would have needed LIDAR/LADAR to avoid powerlines.

Nobody needed LIDAR to avoid powerlines in East Germany. Why would they need it in Yugoslavia? A very pointless argument. TF Hawk was kept down because the air defense threat was too high risk for the Apaches to operate. Comanche, with its improved Arrowhead FLIR and Longbow radar, wouldn't have this issue.

 

[lastdingo]

Nobody needed LIDAR to avoid powerlines in East Germany. Why would they need it in Yugoslavia? A very pointless argument. TF Hawk was kept down because the air defense threat was too high risk for the Apaches to operate. Comanche, with its improved Arrowhead FLIR and Longbow radar, wouldn't have this issue.

Two Apaches crashed there in the mountainous terrain, collision with powerlines was one of the mentioned explanations. You don't have maps of minor powerlines of a foreign country that wasn't allied for quite some time with you. You cannot see them with NVG, cannot reliably see them with FLIR. LIDAR can reliably detect them.

Overall, Apache did fine in the open Iraqi terrain, but TF Hawk was in large part a disaster Apaches crashed in that terrain.

Apaches at night between mountains should not be at much risk from what air defences the Serbs had. They had no thermal sights to aim their ManPADS or ZU-23-2. They would have depended on hearing the helo, firing ILLUM with mortars and then aiming ManPADS by eyesight. Apaches could evade that.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Two Apaches crashed there in the mountainous terrain, collision with powerlines was one of the mentioned explanations. You don't have maps of minor powerlines of a foreign country that wasn't allied for quite some time with you. You cannot see them with NVG, cannot reliably see them with FLIR. LIDAR can reliably detect them.

Fly higher. Something Apache can't do because it has a very large radar signature. Comanche doesn't.

The radar air defense threat is what forces the Apache to fly at low altitude. This is the radar air defense's job.

TF Hawk mainly suffered from a lack of imagination on part of Army planners and a lack of capability on part of Apache to evade Serbian air defense. The fact that Apache crashed in Albania, a nominally neutral and practically friendly country, is not a particularly big issue. They were only practicing low altitude flight, precisely because they were afraid of their choppers being swatted by Serbian Buks and Nevas if they'd flown at higher altitudes, and because their sensors were likely not good enough to capture targets at higher altitudes in bad weather.

Comanche solved both of those problems very neatly. If it had been 24 Comanches instead of 24 Apaches there wouldn't be any issues.

Well, there would still be issues, but they would be entirely related to how the Army treats ATOs and how it literally forgot how JAATs worked.

 

[yasotay]

And yet recently, against two nations with very robust and modern integrated air defenses, expecting to be attacked, had non-stealthy helicopter formations fly in and accomplished their missions over extended distance.
How?
It's called combined arms operations. The military helicopter arm does not operate independently. In major combat they never did. Artillery, CAS, electronic warfare, tanks and IFV are all part of the environment that they operate in. Furthermore they have increased their mission parameters by being a preferred UAS killer by: Ukraine, Russia, Israel, UAE, Kuwait, United States. Others are in the process.

Only us armchair professors of military capability are predicting antiquity.

Commanche was a great program - but with the lack of a major opponent and an ageing helicopter fleet being used heavily in Iraq and Afghanistan the hard decision to cancel the program and put the funds into the current fleet was made.

 

[Kat Tsun]

And yet recently, against two nations with very robust and modern integrated air defenses, expecting to be attacked, had non-stealthy helicopter formations fly in and accomplished their missions over extended distance.
How?
It's called combined arms operations. The military helicopter arm does not operate independently. In major combat they never did. Artillery, CAS, electronic warfare, tanks and IFV are all part of the environment that they operate in. Furthermore they have increased their mission parameters by being a preferred UAS killer by: Ukraine, Russia, Israel, UAE, Kuwait, United States. Others are in the process.

To be fair I'm not sure we can consider Venezuela or Iran to be serious contenders at anything besides being asleep at the wheel. They had modern air defenses, on paper, but they were not well manned, supplied nor trained and drilled to use them. The entire Iranian air defense campaign was only successful in its passive, rather than active, measures. The Venezuelans literally never fired a shot outside of Maduro's immediate security detail who fired on a Chinook IIRC.

The Serbs were much closer to the Ukrainians and Russians than either of those in performance against air threats, and the offensive helicopter uses in the European theater right now is basically just firing fiber optic missiles or lobbing rockets indirectly at BLOS targets, which seems to be where gunships are stuck without helicopter active protection systems and some new combined arms tactics to break the drone threat.

Comanche would be in the same boat as anyone else here, but it would be nimble and fast, so it could also kill Shaheds.

 

[spikedpsycho]

Comanche would have been adequate replacement for Apache/Cobra/kiowa
Because Army had plan to procure a "Heavy" variant.

It could fly sideways at 140 mph, and backwards at 70.

 

[Hydroman]

They could have purchased if they hadn't screwed the program up by adding more and more equipment. Into service as the light attack/scout then block upgrades, a $6B dollar shame at the time of cancellation.