Two members of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) are asking the Navy to explore whether the service needs a medium heavy-lift helicopter to conduct a variety of missions from airborne mine detection to battlefield medical evacuation.
Of concern is that the Navy may be unable to conduct some missions if it has to rely on the MH-60 helicopter, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“If you are really serious about doing battlefield medical evacuation, [the MH-60s] just aren’t big enough for a compact emergency kind of room. You lose the value of that golden hour,” he said. “In search and rescue (SAR), they have a very limited range…170 miles out 170 miles back…if the search area is any distance at all from where you are you have no dwell time there.”
Sikorsky [UTX] builds both the MH-60R and S-model helicopters for the Navy. Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds and integrates the mission systems.
The MH-60R’s key role is primarily for anti-submarine warfare. The MH-60S is a utility helicopter.
Sikorsky delivered the first new production MH-60R to the Navy in August 2005. The MH-60R will replace the fleet’s legacy SH-60B and SH-60F aircraft. The Navy is expected to order as many as 254 MH-60R aircraft through 2015, with production quantities increasing to 30 aircraft per year (Defense Daily, August 30, 2005).
Bartlett is not calling for a new development effort. He noted there are several helicopters that could fill the gap, including the future presidential helicopter VH-71.
“The president’s new helicopter…we don’t need all the stuff they are putting on that, but that airframe I think would do exactly what needs doing,” he said. “It would be a modest modification of something that is working out there every day.”
AugustaWestland, Bell Helicopter Textron [TXT] and Lockheed Martin are building VH-71. The presidential helicopter is a variant of AugustaWestland’s EH101 Merlin, currently in use by the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force.
Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) told sister publication Defense Daily during the same interview that a medium heavy lift helicopter could enable the Navy to swap out the Littoral Combat Ship’s (LCS) mission modules at sea.
Currently the plan calls for LCS to sail either to a forward deployed port or a U.S. port to exchange its mission modules. Sestak questioned whether the Navy could afford to have a LCS off-line for up to a week to travel to a port, swap out the mission modules, and return to combat. “Especially since LCS is to be a significant part of our surface vessels in the future.”
Sestak, a formal three-star admiral, said studies have shown that 30 percent of the three different mission modules is common and could be placed on LCS. The remaining equipment could be kept in 10 ton or 20 ton cargo containers stored on either a mother ship, tender, or an aircraft carrier. The modules enable LCS to shift among conducting mine warfare, anti-submarine and surface warfare.
“To do that you probably need medium to medium heavy-type lift,” he said. “A key requisite of future is speed, the speed to transfer modules or to transfer personnel. With a smaller craft you won’t be able to do it as rapidly. Even under [adverse] weather, if you don’t have a ramp that can come down on the 60 and roll stuff in, you are going to have to hang it all [underneath] and weather can preclude you from doing that.”
Additionally, a medium heavy-lift helicopter might be needed to conduct operations from a sea base, Sestak added.
“Do the new concepts say we might need the logistical challenges to be met with a different type of helicopter for the speed, as well as the weight that has to be transferred? Those are the questions I wanted to lay out for the Navy, from the congressional side, to think about,” he said. “I think it is a legitimate question to be asked. Have you really thought through marrying these transformational sea basing concepts with the logistical challenges they will have.”
On Oct. 3, Bartlett was briefed by Rear Adm. A.G. Myers, director of air warfare (N88), on the service’s lift capabilities. The impetus for the briefing was a discussion on lift held in March.
“I had asked some questions back in March that I got a total non-answer to those questions, that was strangely vetted through OMB [Office of Management and Budget] of all things,” he said.
Bartlett said he complained to HASC’s professional staff, and the chairman, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), set up the October briefing.
According to the October briefing slides obtained by sister publication Defense Daily, the Navy feels the MH-60S and the Sikorsky MH-53E Sea Dragon will meet the service’s lift requirements through 2016.
The results of an upcoming U.S. Fleet Forces Command (FFC) study of vertical lift requirements will help the service make procurement decisions for its lift needs in time for Program Objective Memorandum (POM) 10, according to Myers’ October briefing. The results are expected in November.
“Our concern was that the present Navy helicopter program was hatched back in the 90s when there was very constrained budgeting and they were necking down from seven to two variants of the 60,” Bartlett said. “We felt that with the things that have happened since then, like 9/11, like [operations in Iraq], like more robust funding, like the realization that ports might not always be there and we may have to do it from the sea, that a number of mission were constrained. We were limited if we didn’t have a medium heavy-lift helicopter and we were asking questions relative to that.”
Bartlett added there were questions that arose from this month’s briefing and the Navy has promised they will be answered expeditiously. “Not a non-answer like we got before. I think they need to take a serious look at it. Much of what the Navy needs to do in the future may very well be compromised if they don’t have a medium heavy lift helicopter.”