I wonder what the verdict is now of this decision, 20+ years later. To me, it seems like billions have been wasted duct-tapping together existing capabilities to emulate what the Comanche promised to bring. Finally FARA was going to bring more to the table but the costs were too great and existing drone capability makes the money better spent elsewhere. But Comanche even today looks better than anything else in the battlespace. It was designed to be wired to fly autonomously, in 2000! I’m no expert. I’m not even an informed amateur. But I think the decision made then cost American taxpayers money in the longrun.
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Buck fiddy buys you a drone these days that can do next tree line recon as good as any chopper can. The days of manned frontline recon are over.
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Now let’s make the drones in the shape of the Comanche and make the irony 100% logical.
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Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. -they
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Words to live by…
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The whole reason for war is to kill people. It would be nice of just breaking things would be enough but it isn’t. Societies unfortunate enough to be at war have generally proven that they can handle having nearly all of their stuff broken. Until people start dying or starving, their governments will continue the conflict. I know that this must be a very old philosophical musing, but what happens when warfighters stop dying? If the pilots are drones and the tanks are drones, presumably that means that the infantry will also be drones soon enough. These robots will battle it out and no one gets hurt. I feel like this can go just two ways: War is fought by robots to inflict maximum civilian deaths OR we put humans back into the machines so that their deaths represent the cost of war. Depressing I know but the drone thing drives me bonkers. And I live in NJ, not Ukraine!
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Isn’t it to convince people? Continuation of politics by other means?
If that can be accomplished without killing people, all the better. Normally it involves the threat of death, by destruction or exhuastion of resources, psychological victory, capture of important geography, etc. Simply killing individual infantrymen has never been a productive goal in any conflict, has it?
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We say that because to say anything else is saying the unspeakable. Which is sort of what I am doing. Societies have proven very good at absorbing economic misery. That’s why (IMO+a bit of reading) breaking things doesn’t really work so well. Mothers have to throw stones at the king for sending their young sons off to never return in order for the king to have a change of heart. You are right, the decision makers must be convinced. It’s just that the loss of all the ball-bearing factories will not do the convincing. Nor will robots and drones making smoldering mountains of metal out of each other. Only when they focus their power on the populace will the king back down. The scene at the end of 1917 where the commander basically says soldiers must die, in futility or not doesn’t matter; maybe he was right. Don’t get me wrong. The only uniform I’ve ever worn is the one that turns me into an airborne busdriver. I just see a day, one likely beyond my lifetime, where waring nations return to medieval set pieces to do their “politics by other means” because they would rather soldiers do the dying than the cities.
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I don’t disagree. I do think the canceling of the Comanche led to alot of that funding being shifted to the Apache, which gave it a lot more capability than it was envisioned to have initially. Which worked out in the battle space we were in at the time. I think the problem is that against someone with a working air defense capability sending your heavy attack helo’s out to conduct armed recon isn’t ideal. Sort of like using the F-35’s in “beast mode” load outs days 1 of the war; sure, there’s a lot of capability to do damage there, but it’s not exactly low profile or stealthy. I also think the Comanche had a lot of mission creep going from a recon asset to a stealth attack helo.
Nothing will ever replace the leaders in person reconnaissance. Having your own eyeballs on the ground you’re going to fight over works far better than any map study, remote recon, etc possibly can.
For general tactical intelligence in the current EMW environment I agree with you. However, I don’t think it’s going to be all that long until some bright person figures out a way to jam/garble/generally degraded the pertinent sections of the EM spectrum to either inhibit flight or data collection by drones. Yes, you can use a hardwired drone by an infantry section, but now we’re back to needing people in places to go look.
I’m thinking this discussion should be moved to it’s own thread to keep the KW thread at least mildly on topic?
If that was the case we (the US) have unequivocally won Vietnam, Somalia, our various middle-East conflicts etc. We are extremely good at the killing people and breaking things part. We go into parts of the world with (in our view) nothing really to break, and find out that killing people and breaking what little they have doesn’t accomplish our objective. Because that’s we value in our society. Going to war against someone with different values makes it very difficult to determine if we’re not loosing (since you don’t win in those type of conflicts).
Agreed, and the issue modern politicians struggle with is what are we trying to accomplish. Clearly defined achievable goals have not been a feature of most of out military actions since WW2.
There’s a presumption there about a society’s values and the nature of the conflict. Japan didn’t surrender because we were killing civilians and they revolted against the Emperor, same with Germany. Defeating a miliary is different than defeating a society.
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Good interview with a Kiowa pilot:
Flying & Fighting in the OH-58D: Interview with OH-58D Kiowa combat veteran | Hush-Kit (hushkit.net)
He is not a fan of the MMS or Hellfires, and feels that going to UAS versus manned systems is a mistiake.
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Thanks for posting. That was a great read and I now understand why some crews hated the MMS. Based on Berriochoa’s account I honestly can’t blame them. It’s also a bit disappointing that the Army poured most of its resources and support into the Apache considering the effectiveness of the Kiowa.
Yeah, I liked the big battle story with the “armament dawgs” analogous to an Indy 500 pit crew with rockets laying across their thighs.
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The KW somehow managed to find its way into my shopping basket today …. I have no clue how that happened. 
. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it seems to handle quite nicely and looks really great in VR.
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I agree, to me it looks great! There must be some difference in optimisation between VR (vertices and shading) and flatscreen (texture quality maybe?) that are causing the widely varying views on this module…
I want to do something similar but waiting for the stars alignment 