By Ann Roosevelt

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.–Army aviation must not defer hard decisions to remain agile, lethal and successful, according to the Army Vice Chief of Staff.

“The branch since its inception has made the hard choices,” Gen. Richard Cody told the Army Aviation Association of America annual conference here.

Army aviation has opportunities, despite being at war for more than six years and stretched, he said. Success is not just the decision to terminate the Boeing [BA] /Sikorsky [UTX] RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, it’s where the aviation generals are placed, and the lessons learned that has made the branch more agile and lethal across the battlefield. And, the certain knowledge that “the only reason we have Army aviation is to support soldiers on the ground…We’ll always be there for them, no matter what the weather…and with UAVs we can truly say no matter what the weather.”

As the branch celebrates its 25th year this month, Cody said making hard choices was a characteristic of the branch.

Coming out of Vietnam, adapting to the Soviet threat meant hard choices, with an Army somewhat out of balance as it is today, he said. From that era came Air-Land Battle doctrine, the big five weapon systems, a modernized Cobra helicopter, and modifications to the UH-1 helicopter. Leaders with vision looked to build AH-64 Apache and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and moving the CH-47 Chinook from the Super C to D version.

All this was to strengthen the air-ground team.

Then came Desert One, the first war in Iraq. Cody fired some of the first shots in that war.

Cody said former Chief of Staff Gen. Pete Schoomaker said it best at the time, “you can’t confuse enthusiasm for a combat capability.”

“In many cases we learned those hard lessons,” Cody said.

Those hard choices were to create the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), special mission units and the MH-6 Little Bird.

Those choices meant diverting Black Hawk helicopters that were just being fielded to the 101st to build SOAR.

In the Balkans, Task Force Hawk “was not a failure of Army aviation, not a failure of people, but told us we were not as expeditionary as we thought we were as an Army. It was truly a come as you are patchwork,” Cody said, and showed the results of about a decade of negative funding. There was no aircraft survivability equipment against the missile threat from Kosovo Serbs, the training and rigor of the crews was not what it might be, and the branch was short of command pilots, instructor pilots and crew chiefs.

Aviation learned it had to build the branch better.

Then came 9/11, he said. Taking lessons from Task Force Hawk, plug-and-play was needed for aviation and the ground forces, and brigades had to be set up so that they could be rotated and sustain the readiness required.

The decision to terminate Comanche and build some capability immediately was taken.

“A lot of people don’t know, we [had] just come off resetting [the] entire Apache fleet,” Cody said. “The whole fleet was grounded in 1999, short repair parts.”

The then-vice chief of staff, Gen. Jack Keane, had to ship some $600 million to get the engines and blades ready for what was thought to be a two-year war, he said.

While early in the war on any given day one, two, sometimes up to 10, helicopters in theater were awaiting parts. “We had to get agile,” he said.

Now, with Army aviation racking up 2.2 million flight hours in theater, it can’t do it without a robust depot and front line maintenance and parts capability.

Aviation brigades were restructured and the branch went to two level maintenance.

These were all very tough decisions across the board to change the Army and a very complex and highly technical branch and combat aviation structure while at war and resetting more than 400 helicopters a year.

And, Cody knocked on the wooden podium, there were “no maintenance related Class A actions all during this.” That speaks volumes for the depot and theater teams. Those 2.2 million flight hours are probably something like 15 million wrench-turning hours, he said.

“These were tough, hard decisions to do, but we had to do it because of the war we were fighting,” he said. But there’s more to do, from tweaking leader development and pilot flight time, and do it all while on 15-month combat tours.

Army aviation needs to keep learning to find out where the next decisions will be and make those decisions earlier rather than later when they must be made.

For example, lessons come in every day from Iraq and Afghanistan about how aviation can be better, and decisions are made that make a difference on the battlefield a month or two down the road.

For example, putting the 701D engines on Medical Evacuation helicopters, deciding on the right air-ground radios as the Army continues to build the Future Combat System where air is inextricably linked–seeing the same video downloads from UAVs in the cockpit, the air tactical operations centers and maneuver operation centers–“We’ve learned the lessons of the past,” Cody said.

The challenge Army aviation faces today is determining when decisions have to be made, how fast it can be done, so the branch doesn’t come up against bad choices later.