I’ve been get­ting a lot of feed­back on the Osprey post from Wednesday, which “spec­u­lates” on the Marines’ deploy­ment to Afghanistan, and par­tic­u­larly why the ser­vice refuses to talk on the record about it in detail.

Well, I’ve got a lit­tle more “informed spec­u­la­tion” on the deploy­ment from a vari­ety of sources and I thought I’d throw them out to DT read­ers for their pass.

There may be a cou­ple other rea­sons for why the Corps can’t or won’t talk about the details of the deployment…first of all, let’s get one thing straight: all indi­ca­tors are that the 22 MEU, which has 10 MV-​​22s from VMM-​​263 (the squadron I embed­ded with in Afghanistan) will chop their birds to 261 for the deploy­ment. It’s pretty weak sauce that the Corps can’t fly 261’s planes from CONUS to Afghanistan — the MV-​​22 is touted as being “self-deployable”…but I’ll admit it would be a LONG, gru­el­ing series of flights to do that.

Renting an amphib to ship them over would prob­a­bly give the Navy heart pal­pi­ta­tions on the costs — so that’s a no go after the polit­i­cal pres­sure of the “first” deploy­ment is gone (remem­ber, they shipped 263’s planes to Kuwait via a solo-​​mission amphib for the Osprey’s first ever deployment).

So let’s agree that the Ospreys are com­ing from the MEU. I’ll betcha fleet com­man­ders are loath to admit that they’ll be los­ing all the ERG’s medium lift capa­bil­ity, so they’d pre­fer not to broad­cast that fact too widely (though I think that’s a pretty weak argu­ment too since they’ll have 53s to exe­cute any con­tin­gency ops).

There’s also the poten­tial CENTCOM angle. In order to get the Ospreys into Helmand, they’d have to fly over Pakistan. Now, it’s one thing to fly KCs and fight­ers over Pakistan at high alti­tude, but the Ospreys will have to fly well within visual range of some civvies who might not take too kindly to their air­space being used by US forces to even­tu­ally help kill Talibs. Maybe CENTCOM hasn’t fin­ished a deal with Pakistan for over­flight rights?

Anyway, I’m hear­ing indi­ca­tors that jibe with DT com­menter “Ed” inso­faras Gates might have pushed this announce­ment ahead of the Corps’ readi­ness to talk about it. Get the damned thing over there, already! he’s say­ing. Well, let’s do it.

PS — Am still try­ing to line up a more detailed inter­view on this but all indi­ca­tors are that the Remote Guardian sys­tem will be retro­fit­ted to the Ospreys in-​​country.

– Christian

My col­league Jamie McIntyre has a post over on his new blog, The Line of Departure, on the Osprey’s pend­ing deploy­ment to Afghanistan.

He for­wards some intel from the Rainman of all things Osprey, Rick Whittle, who cov­ered the plane as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News and took the buy­out a few years ago to write his upcom­ing book on the helo/​fixed wing hybrid trans­port “The Dream Machine: The untold story of the noto­ri­ous V-​​22 Osprey.”

I’ve worked with Rick a lot on sto­ries back in his reg­u­lar jour­nal­ism days and I con­sider him a friend and col­league. He for­warded a note to Jamie giv­ing his take on the deploy­ment, which is now set for November, and I invite you to read the whole post at TLOD.

This is the first deploy­ment to Afghanistan and it should be the acid test, given the ter­rain and cli­mate and the fact that Al Qaeda and the Taliban will surely be gun­ning for the air­craft if they see it. The Osprey didnt get shot at much in Iraq because it was fly­ing mainly in Anbar province, which was pretty peace­ful at that time. It flew well in Iraq, even in sear­ing heat, but most of that coun­try is barely above sea level. Rotorcraft lose per­for­mance at higher alti­tudes and in hot tem­per­a­tures, and Afghanistan is pretty high and hot.

Rick’s got a point, though I would caveat it with the fact that in all like­li­hood the Ospreys will be oper­at­ing mostly in sup­port of RC-​​South where the capi­tol of Helmand pro­vide sits at around 3,400 feet in ele­va­tion. I’d be inter­ested to see the inside scoop on whether the Osprey can take off and land in a full-​​on hover in the alti­tudes of RC-​​East, though I sus­pect like with lots of helos (even the CH-​​47) there are some weight and land­ing alti­tude restric­tions that will bracket the Osprey’s operations.

But don’t get all excited about heli­copter assault mis­sions and stuff either. Yes, some Marine units deployed for com­bat oper­a­tions via CH-​​53s ear­lier this sum­mer, but I doubt seri­ously those chomp­ing for a Robert’s Ridge style air assault test will get what they’re ask­ing for.

I will say this how­ever, the Marine Corps refuses to speak on the record whether VMM-​​261 is tak­ing its own air­craft or will fall in on air­craft in the area (the 22 MEU has Ospreys aboard its amphibs). If the squadron takes its own air­craft, would it self-​​deploy them or ship them over? We all know the answer to that one.

The excuse given is that alter­na­tively the Marine Corps is wor­ried about “oper­a­tional secu­rity” by talk­ing about how and when the planes will get there. Don’t worry folks, I cried foul on that one, but was still denied any details. I was then told that the Corps was hop­ing to reduce the stress any media atten­tion would have on the squadron so best not to say any­thing which would prompt more questions…

Why the para­noia? Does the Corps worry about opsec when it talks F-​​18, Harrier, Cobra, 53 and 46 squadron deployments…yes, to some extent, but there isn’t a media black­out on it like there is here. Just what is the ser­vice wor­ried about? Didn’t Iraq prove that the plane could do what it was billed to do? Why still the first time jit­ters? Or is it, as my boss sus­pects, that there’s some­thing to hide here? Miserable mis­sion capa­ble rates, poor main­te­nance sup­port, dete­ri­o­rat­ing parts etc.

I’m still on it, but let’s ener­gize the grid to get some answers folks.

Also, one last thing — still check­ing up on the deploy­ment of the Remote Guardian gun sys­tem. We reported that the Corps planned to arm the Afghanistan MV-​​22s with the under­belly gun, but now there’s some doubt based on the mys­tery sur­round­ing which planes will be part of the deploy­ment. The 22 MEU birds don’t have the guns, and I’m not sure if the 261 planes have it either…so can the sys­tem be retro­fit­ted in country?

– Christian

DoD Buzz con­tribut­ing edi­tor Greg Grant has a great piece run­ning on our sis­ter site about maneu­ver­ing restric­tions placed on Osprey pilots that could make them more vul­ner­a­ble to MANPAD encoun­ters in combat.

GAO also said: The V-​​22 had maneu­ver­ing lim­its that restrict its abil­ity to per­form defen­sive maneu­vers. The word­ing in that sen­tence sounded odd. Is GAO say­ing the plane can­not per­form defen­sive maneu­vers or is there some reg­u­la­tion against it per­form­ing cer­tain maneu­vers? Not the same thing.

I asked a Marine offi­cer who is very knowl­edge­able on the sub­ject of V-​​22 sur­viv­abil­ity about the GAOs find­ings. The offi­cer requested anonymity so as to speak frankly about a polit­i­cally charged issue and I thought it impor­tant to at least present another voice in the Osprey debate.

The offi­cer said the maneu­ver­ing lim­its in the offi­cial Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization were set by engi­neers who did not carry out the full bat­tery of tests on the plane because of money short­ages dur­ing the oper­a­tional test phase. The Ospreys trou­bled devel­op­men­tal his­tory meant the focus was on keep­ing the plane in the air, not on test­ing it in bat­tle­field situations. 

Read his entire story HERE to see what led to the NATOPS restric­tions on rad­i­cal pitch­ing of the V-​​22 to lure sur­face to air mis­siles into coun­ter­mea­sures and more on why those restric­tions were put into place and whether the Osprey can actu­ally endure the maneu­vers anyway.

But I also wanted to point out here a great com­ment that fol­lowed the story in the Buzz dis­cus­sion session.

According to a cur­rent V-​​22 pilot (seems from AFSOC) the crit­ics are full of it:

and lacks the maneu­ver­abil­ity to evade hos­tile ground fire.

Compared to what? A heli­copter? A C-​​130? A fighter? It is none of the­seso how can one say it lacks suf­fi­cient maneu­ver­abil­ity? Ignorance and drink­ing too much kool-​​aidthats how.

I have been fly­ing on this air­craft for 5+ years. Before that, I spent 8 years on the MH-​​53 Pavelow. The CV-​​22, like the MH-​​53 is designed (IR and RF coun­ter­mea­sures) to go into any­thing up a medium threat envi­ron­ment. Very few air­craft go into a high threat envi­ron­ment. Those that do, do it with a gorilla pack­age of sup­port (SEAD, CAP, ect). Further, to my knowl­edge NO tac­ti­cal trans­port air­craft today or ever, go into, intended or oth­er­wise, a high threat envi­ron­ment with­out lots of sup­port and even then, the threat is usu­ally degraded beforehand.

You take my word for what it is worth

The V-​​22 or at least the CV-​​22 is per­fectly capa­ble of oper­at­ing in a medium threat envi­ron­ment. The com­bi­na­tion of defen­sive coun­ter­mea­sures, speed, alti­tude, noise sig­na­ture, IR sig­na­ture and yes, maneu­ver­abil­ity makes the air­craft very capa­ble in a com­bat zone.

Most of these hacks are just repeat­ing what some anti-​​V-​​22 lob­bi­est said to them or some biased report con­tains. The bot­tom line here is that this just another effort to can­cel the V-​​22. NEWS FLASHit wont happen.

The USMC has retired over half of its H-​​46s and is fully invested in the tran­si­tion to the V-​​22. USSOCOM is fully behind this air­craft and what it willis bring­ing the SOF war fighter. Additionally, there is WAY too much sup­port from mem­bers of con­gress, on both sides of the aisle, to keep this pro­gram going.

I will agree, how­ever, reli­a­bil­ity leaves a lot to be desired. However, I have seen marked improve­ment over the last 12 months. The issue we are deal­ing with has to do with part­snot the capa­bil­ity or safety of the air­craft. The biggest issue has been parts that arent sup­posed to break, break­ing. Parts that are sup­posed to have a 500 hour life break­ing at 250 hours and all of this with a VERY imma­ture sup­ply sys­tem. The pos­i­tive side of things here is that he engi­neers have been very respon­sive and effec­tive at improv­ing their parts. The air­craft is very capa­bleat least from my USAF/​SOF per­spec­tive. I will con­cede how­ever, that if reli­a­bil­ity con­tin­ues to be a prob­lem in the long term, even­tu­ally capa­bil­ity will be impacted.

We have put almost 60,000 hours on the V-​​22 since we returned to flight in 2003. To date the V-​​22 has been on only 4 com­bat deploy­ments over the last 20 months. Simply put, we are only in the 1st quar­terthere is long way to go.

You all well know I’m a minor­ity sup­porter of the V-​​22 for var­i­ous rea­sons, not least of which for its supe­rior per­for­mance. Most of the crit­ics of the plane have never flown in one — and have par­tic­u­larly never flown in one in a com­bat zone under aus­tere con­di­tions. I have.

But don’t take my word for it, take the word of AFSOC pilot “Jim” who says the plane is more capa­ble than its heli­copter pre­de­ces­sors and that the prob­lems that crit­ics cling to are being worked out as the plane increas­ingly flies in the hands of combat-​​veteran pilots through­out the services.

– Christian

A retired Marine who also hap­pens to be one of the most pow­er­ful defense law­mak­ers, Rep. Jack Murtha, has begun rais­ing ques­tions about the future of the Osprey MV-​​22 The chair­man of the House Appropriations defense sub­com­mit­tee said that he plans to go down to Camp Lejeune in the next few weeks to do a real­ity check. Thats where Im going to find out what the hell is hap­pen­ing, the ever-​​blunt Murtha said.

The mil­i­tary tends to give you noth­ing but opti­mistic por­tray­als, he added. They have been telling me the V-​​22 was doing fine. Well, not so much, as was made clear at yes­ter­days hear­ing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Osprey does face severe main­te­nance prob­lems, Murtha said, adding that they are to be expected in the early stages of an air­crafts deployment.

While he said its just too early to know just what to do about the air­craft, Murtha also made pretty clear that he does not think it nec­es­sary to shut down pro­duc­tion of the MV-​​22, as his col­league, Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-​​NY), chair­man of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said yes­ter­day. At this point we are com­mit­ted and we have to go for­ward with the V-​​22, he said.

Meanwhile, the Marines began their coun­ter­at­tack designed to res­cue the hostage MV-​​22. I spoke for about an hour this after­noon with Lt. Col. Rob Freeland, an Osprey pilot with about 1,000 hours on the plane.

He made it very clear that the Marines are doing every­thing they can to bring down main­te­nance costs. The GAO report pre­sented at yes­ter­days hear­ing claimed the cur­rent cost per flight hour of the MV-​​22 today is over $11,000more than dou­ble the tar­get esti­mate and 140 per­cent higher than the cost for the CH-​​46E. Freeland said the fly­ing hour cost for the B model the plane that is fly­ing in com­bat is closer to $9,700 and will come down over the next two to four years as the Marines imple­ment a range of engi­neer­ing change orders and craft a main­te­nance contract.

Among the engi­neer­ing changes the Marines have recently made to save money, Freeland listed infrared sup­pres­sor pan­els. We used to replace those at $110,000 a piece. Thats because we didnt expect them to break, he said. Now the ser­vice is repair­ing them for $10,000 per unit. In addi­tion, they have devel­oped $10,000 repair pro­ce­dures for flap­er­ons that they used to replace $280,000 a pop. And Coanda valves will be repaired for $5,000 instead of replac­ing them for $27,000.

We know we are on a path that will get us there, to lower main­te­nance costs, he said. The per­for­mance based main­te­nance con­tract cur­rently being nego­ti­ated will lead to the longest last­ing and most sub­stan­tial sav­ings over time, he pre­dicted. Due to be signed in 2010, that con­tract should start show­ing sub­stan­tial sav­ings after three years.

Read the rest of this story and oth­ers at DoD Buzz.

– Colin Clark

The Marine Corps is tak­ing the Osprey to its fight in Afghanistan and its a more lethal ver­sion than the MV-​​22 the Corps top avi­a­tion offi­cer cred­ited with help­ing tame Iraqs Anbar province. 

Pending suc­cess­ful test­ing, the Corps plans to deploy a con­tin­gent of recently devel­oped weapons sys­tem kits that will pro­vide the MV-​​22 Osprey with 360-​​degree fire­power, accord­ing to Lt. Gen. George J. Trautman III, deputy com­man­dant for aviation. 

But Trautman con­fessed the Corps wont rack up body counts with the new weapon, which is defen­sive in nature, designed for fire sup­pres­sion dur­ing high-​​speed infil and exfil missions. 

I wouldnt expect to kill a lot of peo­ple with this sys­tem, Trautman said. Its a very dif­fi­cult chal­lenge with­out sophis­ti­cated fire con­trol tech­nol­ogy to be pre­cise in your targeting. 

The Corps has ordered nine of the so-​​called Remote Guardian System kits, but hopes to buy scores more to out­fit the entire fleet of MV-​​22 air­craft. The 7.62mm rotary can­non in the RGS is mounted in the belly of an Osprey and is con­trolled by a crew­man with a video game-​​like joy­stick and video monitor. 

The ser­vice is also work­ing to upgrade the Ospreys ramp-​​mounted machine gun to a .50 cal­iber ver­sion from its cur­rent M240 7.62mm machine gun.

The Osprey, Trautman boasts, will rede­fine the Afghan bat­tle space where Leathernecks tan­gle with insur­gent and Taliban forces in small units sep­a­rated by 8,000-foot snow-​​capped moun­tains and vast rocky badlands. 

Were incred­i­bly con­fi­dent [that] hav­ing the Osprey in that envi­ron­ment is going to pay div­i­dends for our forces, and thats why we are intently focused on get­ting the air­craft into that the­ater, he said dur­ing an inter­view with mil­i­tary bloggers. 

Trautman said the Corps aim is to deploy a hand­ful of RGS detach­able mis­sion kits armed with sur­veil­lance capa­bil­i­ties on an MV-​​22 squadron bound for Afghanistans harsh envi­ron­ment this fall. 

Thousands of Marines are expected to join in the increased American troop pres­ence in Afghanistan fol­low­ing President Barack Obamas call for 10,000 more boots and rifles to wrest con­trol from a resur­gent Taliban.

(more…)

We’re work­ing the details now, but appar­ently a loose bolt was found in an area near the rotors on deployed MV-​​22 Ospreys which was wor­ry­ing enough to Red Stripe the entire fleet.

Colin’s bang­ing out all the infor­ma­tion he could get in a piece for DoD Buzz, but for now, that’s what I’ve got.

Be sure to check over at the Buzz for more infor­ma­tion in a few minutes.

UPDATE:All 84 Ospreys were tem­porar­ily grounded fol­low­ing the dis­cov­ery of loose bolts in a V-​​22 in Iraq.

“This is a tem­po­rary ground­ing bul­letin issued strictly as a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure,” NavAir spokesman Mike Welding said Tuesday evening. “If one of those came lose in flight, the worst case sce­nario you would lose con­trol of the affected prop rotor,” he said, adding that no planes had been affected in flight. “Our pri­or­ity first and fore­most is safety.”

Four planes have had prob­lems with the bolts, which help con­trol the rotors. Two of those are back in the air, Welding said. The repairs take two days, he said.

All the affected planes are in Iraq, he said, adding that the cause of the loose bolts is not entirely clear yet and inves­ti­ga­tions are pro­ceed­ing to fig­ure out why they came loose.

The Marines expect the “red stripe” notice “to have a min­i­mal impact on oper­a­tions,” said Maj. Eric Dent, a Marine spokesman in Washington.

– Christian

There are a cou­ple more things from the MGen. Kelly inter­view that I wanted to throw out there for you all to ponder. 

First, Kelly show­ered pretty high praise on the MV-​​22 Osprey in his the­ater. He added more to the “higher, far­ther, faster” argu­ment that most pro­po­nents (and some reporters like yours truly) say about the bird, and took on the argu­ment that the MV-​​22 wasn’t really tested in the Iraq deploy­ment — namely because it wasn’t drop­ping into hot LZs.

“When I got there there was some crit­i­cism that the air­plane was untested and all that and that the Marines are pro­tect­ing it and the com­man­ders won’t let it go into hot LZs,” Kelly said. “Well, the fact is, you don’t inten­tion­ally ever go into a hot LZ. If you go into a hot LZ know­ingly, you’re prob­a­bly not play­ing smart base­ball. … Gen. Odierno and Gen. Petraeus fell in love with it … because it zips around the way it does it was doing a lot more VIP lift­ing that I thought it should, so I took it out of the VIP busi­ness and got it dirty.”

So this is the argu­ment I was bandy­ing around last year when I came back from Iraq (I spent a week with VMM-​​263 in the first ever Osprey deploy­ment). Kelly under­stands the logic behind exchang­ing speed, alti­tude (and th abil­ity to attain alti­tude very quickly) and reduced audio sig­na­ture (he said the air­craft can come down rapidly from 9K feet to a ver­ti­cal land­ing with a lot less noise than a CH-​​46 or 53) with .50cal machine guns. And he knows than when a com­man­der can, he’ll try to avoid a hot LZ every time because it ain’t like a Phrog or a Shitter can do much bet­ter — they’d be sit­ting ducks too. 

And here’s some more he said about the reli­a­bil­ity argument:

“The avail­abil­ity num­bers when I first got there hov­ered around 65 per­cent or so and by the time I left it was pretty stan­dard at about 85 per­cent the Marines that fix and work on it under­stand what parts go sooner rather than later … the young mechan­ics learned what needed to be done to keep it up, so I think it’s fully tested.”

This is a point I really can’t shed any light on other than to say that main­tain­ers I talked to in Iraq at the time said the down time for the Osprey wasn’t any more than any other air­craft they’d main­tained, and was much less than the 46. There were some prob­lems with things going bad before expected and things not going bad that were expected to fail sooner (result­ing in parts sur­pluses and short­ages), but that’s what you learn dur­ing a first deploy­ment, right?

(more…)

For the first time ever, a detach­ment of V-​​22 Ospreys deployed from its home base in the United States, fly­ing across the Atlantic Ocean to an exer­cise in north­ern Africa. 

Four CV-​​22 Ospreys from the Hurlburt Field, Fla.-based 8th Special Operations Squadron lifted off in October from the sand dunes and palm trees of their Gulf coast base and flew more than 6,000 miles to the rock-​​strewn deserts of Bamako, Mali. 

The air­craft oper­ated for about three weeks there in sup­port of Operation Flintlock — a joint 10th Special Forces Group and North African com­mando exer­cise intended to sharpen com­bat skills and build military-​​to-​​military relations. 

But it was also a com­ing out party for the spe­cial oper­a­tions ver­sion of the Osprey. 

“We were really able to val­i­date the direc­tion we were going — in train­ing and development-​​wise — [and] that we were on track,” said 8th SOS com­man­der Lt. Col. Eric Hill in a Dec. 18 inter­view with Military​.com. “We’re ready for any­thing at this point. We’re ready as a squadron and we’re ready as a capability.“ 

An ear­lier plan to self-​​deploy a squadron of MV-​​22s from Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263 to com­bat duty in Iraq in 2007 had to be scrubbed because of wor­ries that some of the onboard sys­tems weren’t robust enough to accom­mo­date the gru­el­ing long-​​distance flight. 

Critics pointed to the Osprey’s finicky de-​​icing sys­tem, designed to shed frozen water from the aircraft’s wings on cold, high alti­tude flights, as the main rea­son why the Marines’ Ospreys were shipped to Kuwait by boat rather than giv­ing the plane a chance to prove its adver­tised capability. 

But after months of train­ing and metic­u­lous plan­ning to avoid nasty weather, the pilots and crew from the 8th SOS made it to Mali after two overnight stops and mul­ti­ple mid-​​air refu­el­ings — a major achieve­ment for an air­craft the Air Force is pur­chas­ing to replace the ven­er­a­ble MH-​​53 Pave Low. 

“Since this was the first time we’ve flown trans-​​Atlantic we did do some rehearsals,” Hill said. “Not as long in dura­tion, but to rehearse and refine [tech­niques] to exe­cute that deployment.”

(more…)