Army Aviation Transforms While Busier Than Ever
Army Aviation Transforms While Busier Than Ever
The demand for Army aviation is higher than it’s ever been, and it will be critical to continue modernizing the fleet.
During more than two decades of counterinsurgency operations in the U.S. Central Command area of operations, the Army’s combat aviation brigades deployed multiple times, “and we thought we were busy then,” Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, director of Army aviation in the office of the deputy Army chief of staff for operations, G-3/5/7, said during a Hot Topic on Army aviation hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army.
While there are “in some instances a thought that we’re not that busy anymore,” Braman said, combat aviation brigades have been on the move almost nonstop.
Of the Army’s 12 aviation brigades, eight are “on assigned missions as we speak. That’s a lot,” he said. Two of the four remaining brigades were on a ship returning from deployments, and the other two “are getting ready to train and deploy to their next mission,” he said.
With the active component in full operational swing, “we are fully executing and utilizing the force structure we have right now to meet a portion of the demand that the ground force commanders and our combat commanders need from us now,” Braman said.
During the counterinsurgency years, Braman said, deployment rotations included aviation units from the Army National Guard and Army Reserve. The Army aviation enterprise is considering “targeted methods” to use the reserve components again, “and there’s a cost to that,” he said.
“We heavily used [the reserve components] for almost two decades, and so there is a reset period this time for us to modernize them and also then get them geared up for their next mission,” he said.
Over time, Braman said, more capabilities have been added to the Army’s decades-old aircraft, but from a safety and modernization position, “we’ve got to go back and look at the basics of what we do just from a stick and rotor standpoint.”
Braman pointed to foreign military sales of helicopters to allies and partners as “our greatest advantage over our competitors … by far.”
Australia has purchased 40 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, which is “huge for us in [the] Indo-Pacific to expand that reach so we don’t have to deploy an element there, potentially,” Braman said. He added that Poland bought 96 AH-64 Apache helicopters, “and that’s multiple brigades out of [the] Army that don’t have to be forward … on a day-to-day basis.”
“When the U.S. goes to war, we don’t do it alone, so a more lethal, ready and interoperable coalition force really makes sure that we’re less likely to lose on the battlefields of the future,” Braman said.