ARTICLE

March 2004

Army Aviation Must Change To Stay Relevant, Says Panel

by Sandra I. Erwin

Army aviators will adopt many of the tactics, techniques and aircraft maintenance practices that traditionally have been unique to special operations forces, said senior officials. This will help prepare Army aviation units for the unconventional warfare and combined-arms operations prevalent in current conflicts.

A push to make conventional aviation more “SOF-like” is only one piece of a broad set of recommendations by the Army’s Aviation Task Force, a panel of 55 experts led by Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman. The chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, asked Thurman to probe the state of Army aviation, identify problems and propose fixes.

He particularly became concerned that the Army’s aviation structure is too inflexible and its maintenance systems too cumbersome and costly. A former special operator, Schoomaker pinpointed areas where SOF aviation has excelled—capabilities he believes could be transferred to the conventional Army.

Thurman’s task force met over five months and put together a study that, he hopes, will lead to actual reforms and avoid the fate of previous studies that were shelved and never implemented.

“It’s time to quit studying aviation and get on with what we say we are going to do, resource it properly and move out with it,” Thurman said in a speech to the Association of the U.S. Army.

He said the Army has sponsored at least seven aviation studies during the past 25 years, none of which resulted in any meaningful changes.

Despite a growing demand for Army airlift and close-air support in Afghanistan and Iraq, the chief specifically told Thurman to not recommend any “growth” in the force structure, which today is about 3,200 aircraft. Rather, Schoomaker wants to find ways to make existing aircraft work more effectively with ground forces and with the other services. He also is intent on simplifying the maintenance and repair of helicopters, for which costs have skyrocketed during the past year.

Thurman looked at the operations of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) as a model of how to improve the conventional units.

“That doesn’t mean making conventional forces look like SOF, but there are SOF capabilities we can cascade right now,” said Thurman.

Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army deputy chief of staff for operations, said this approach makes sense, as conventional aviation today fights in many of the same environments as SOF units—jointly with other services, and mostly in urban settings.

“We want the 160th to be way ahead of our conventional aviation forces,” he said. “But the conventional force we have put on the battlefield in the past two years absolutely benefited from the … leading-edge tactics and technology the 160th has cascaded down to the conventional force.”

Increasingly, the conventional aviation force is involved in operations that typically would have been viewed as SOF missions. “We have to ensure that our conventional forces are trained and equipped so there is a seamless synergy with SOF,” said Cody. “We have to have common technology and, to a certain point, common tactics, techniques and procedures.”

However, the cost of the advanced avionics and survivability technologies found in SOF aircraft puts them out of reach for conventional forces.

The 160th spends on average $19 million per airframe on upgrades, compared to $3 million for conventional aircraft, said Brig. Gen. E.J. Sinclair, commander of the Army Aviation Center. “We cannot afford to do that in all conventional aircraft,” he said.

Among the SOF systems being contemplated for the conventional forces are the SOAR common cockpit, night vision systems, standardized engines and communications gear. The multimode radar now being installed on all SOF aircraft is too expensive, not to mention the cost associated with training and pilot certification, said Sinclair.

Air refueling booms also would be out of the question. “The cost and training make it prohibitive,” he said.

In the short term, the Army wants to incorporate SOF standardized maintenance automation and tracking system, mission planning and mission rehearsal technologies.

Although the Army has been developing the advanced Global Command and Support System-Army, the technology is years away from deployment, and cannot help soldiers in the near term.

GCSS-A would not be ready until at least 2007, said Thurman. “That’s too long. We are at war, and we have to fix this now.”

The special operations units have been using automated logistics for 10 years, he said. “We need to share that.”

After looking at current Army logistics systems, Thurman concluded that they are inadequate. In 2004, “we still don’t have a viable logistics automation program out there for our conventional aviation force.

“When you don’t have standard systems across the Army, it results in data gaps and errors.” For example, the Army has no standard software tool to gauge the mean time between failures across the fleet.

Schoomaker wants to make aviation maintenance less labor intensive. Maintenance crews now make up 85 percent of the aviation force. “Today’s maintenance is parts-intensive and accounts for the majority of aircraft downtime,” said Thurman. “This approach is outdated, given the advances in prognostics technology.”

The existing fleet, most of which consists of older aircraft, was designed to be supported by a large logistics tail.

The Army wants to downsize from three-level to two-level maintenance, eliminating an intermediate layer and saving labor hours and equipment. That is hard to do with older systems, which never were designed for two-level maintenance.

“We must change some of our design concepts, organizations, processes, especially our weapon systems,” said Thurman.

The new night-vision sensor system for the Apache helicopter, for example, is being designed for two-level maintenance. That means certain modules will be replaced on the flight line. “You can eliminate the electronic equipment test sets that are out in the field, and they don’t have to maintain the test program set for each of the individual line replaceable units,” said Bob Gunning, director of Apache sensor programs at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.

“Systems have to be designed for two-level maintenance,” he said in an interview. The current Apache sensors are 1970s technology. Now, components are much more modular, easier to replace, systems can do built-in tests and alert the crew chief that something has failed.

Thurman said that eliminating a layer of support will allow maintenance platoons to move further forward in the fight. “The logistics tail can be shortened by placing sustainment repair capability forward at both Army and joint levels.”

Automation technology also is needed to be able to predict shortages of spare parts.

“We don’t have the luxury in the theater to keep asking for more intra-theater lift and more containers,” said Thurman. “The current standard Army information management system is inefficient and complicated. It takes 40 hours to train a soldier.”

Stephen N. Finger, president of Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., said helicopter suppliers are working to get “emergency modifications” into the field—such as improved inlet particle separators, filters, and new designs of rotor and transmissions parts. The “predictive” logistics envisioned by Thurman, however, is not feasible in the near term, because older helicopters lack the latest prognostics and diagnostics technology. By nature, older aircraft require more maintenance and hard-to-get parts. The situation will change drastically, Finger said, as the Army fields new helicopter models in the years ahead.

The Army’s program manager for cargo aircraft, Col. William T. Crosby, said the root of the problem is the lack of knowledge of the status of the fleet and the supply lines.

“In all our systems today, we react to demands, but we don’t understand the demands. … We have to start giving the soldier the ability to predict accurately.” When a part gets repaired, “we don’t get to see why it failed. So how can we truly forecast what we truly need to sustain the fleet?”

Crosby’s office is developing a software tool that links different logistics systems within the Army. Now, each major command in the Army has its own metrics, none of which is tied together to get an across-the-board look at the performance of the fleet.

Accurate forecasting should help lower the cost of parts, said Crosby. Army program managers tend to blame industry for raising prices, but it would be unfair to expect contractors to keep prices from fluctuating, unless the Army can accurately predict the demand and order accordingly. “Industry’s price will come down when they have a stable business base,” Crosby said.

Another program under Crosby’s watch is a “tagging” system to track spare parts.

“We do not have situational awareness,” said Brig. Gen. James H. Pillsbury, head of the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command. In recent months, the Army sent more than 350 helicopter engines to Central Command, but there is no mechanism to track the whereabouts of each engine.

Changes Ahead
The Aviation Task Force also was asked to figure out how Army aviation units can be reorganized following common standards and procedures—what the Army calls a “modular” structure. That would allow a joint commander, for example, to “mix and match” aviation companies or brigades, based on the mission at hand.

The force today is anything but modular. There are five different active aviation brigades in the active force, two different structures in the Army National Guard. In echelons above corps and above division, units are organized in different ways.

“There are no standard formations out there,” said Thurman. Each unit has its own procedures, tactics and training techniques.

The current structure is a product of the Cold War. When aviation became a separate branch of the service in 1983, various types of organizations sprung up, each preparing to face different threats.

Requirements now have changed, with the emphasis being on joint operations and rapid response. The Army will migrate to more brigade-level formations as the primary maneuver force, and aviation units will have to be able to self deploy and be ready to move from one theater to another, if necessary.

Thurman said the only way to fix this is to train commanders to follow common standards.

The employment of unmanned air vehicles also was highly scrutinized by the Aviation Task Force. Although the Army is fielding more UAVs than ever before, with more on the way, Thurman said he is not convinced the service has a solid doctrine for UAVs and expressed doubts that the Army needs eight different types of UAVs. “This is expensive stuff. You have to get quality over quantity as you structure the force.”

The Army has yet to come to grips with how to “deconflict” the airspace when multiple UAVs are in operation, Thurman said. There is no clear estimate of what it costs to maintain these systems, and there is no joint doctrine for how to operate with other services’ UAVs.

To be sure, UAVs can be valuable in many areas, said Thurman. “But it’s difficult if you just rely on UAVs to maintain contact with the enemy. UAVs need to be matched up with a thinking guy on the battlefield.”

The task force also reviewed the fixed-wing fleet. The Army operates eight models of fixed-wing aircraft, of 15 different brands. Thurman said the Army is not likely to downsize the fixed-wing fleet in the foreseeable future.

“This war tells us is that there is a great demand for theater aviation,” he said. Helicopters could not possibly take over the logistics functions now performed by the fixed-wing fleet.

Cody said it’s unlikely that the chief will endorse all the Task Force recommendations, because the Army could not afford them. The service spent $4.8 billion to prep the aviation force for the war in Iraq, but that money will not be available again next year. For maintenance and repairs of helicopters coming back from the war, Congress appropriated $1.6 billion for fiscal year 2004, but that still leaves $1 billion in “unfunded” requirements for spare parts and depot work.

“The chief is going to have to make some tough calls,” said Cody. “There is not enough money to fund all the things that the aviation task force has come up with.”

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