 Morning, everyone. Thanks for coming. I appreciate you taking the time. I'm Marin Leid at CSIS. I'm a senior advisor in the Harold Brown Chair here. This is the first event in a series of events that we'll be doing hopefully with all of the services on their future rotorcraft issues as part of a broadened version of the ground forces dialogue. We're now starting the security dialogues to deal with sort of cross-cutting joint issues. And so this is a reschedule of something we'd hope to hold earlier. We were also hoping to hold a Marine Corps rotorcraft event a couple of weeks ago that got snowed out. So we're off to a slow start, but happy to finally get this underway. Very honored this morning to have with us Brigadier General John Ferrari, who's the military deputy in program analysis and valuation on the Army staff. Colonel John Lindsay, who's the director of, oops, sorry, Colonel Frank Tate, who's the chief of aviation force development in Army G8 on the Army staff, and Colonel John Lindsay, who is the director of aviation in the Army G3. To talk, I assume that most of our discussion today will focus on the restructure initiative that the Army's put forth for its helicopter fleet going forward, but also want to spend a little bit of time talking about what comes after that and the longer term future of Army aviation. So again, very happy to have all three of you here. Really appreciate you taking the time, and General Ferrari, over to you. Well, first, thanks to yourself and CSIS for hosting this event. We were supposed to do it a few weeks ago, but it was before the release of the president's budget. It got delayed, and so we had to cancel because of all the things. So thanks for everybody for coming out. I know everybody's busy. The Army, as an institution, has been taking budget reductions now for several years. If you go back to 2012, and you looked forward to the 2016 budget, which is a year from now, or the 2015 budget this year, we thought we were going to have about $150 billion, right? So you fast forward now to 2015 to the budget that's on the hill, and it's about $120 billion. So that's a 20% reduction in buying power in a very, very short period of time. The Army has three places that it puts its money. It puts it in structure, which is people. So the Army is about people. We equip our soldiers. The other services have much more procurement in their budgets, but we're people. That takes up about 50% of our budget because we are people-centric. The rest of the money, about 30% of it goes to readiness in current operations, not including the war. This is all base budget. And then another 20% of it goes into modernization. And those percentages vary over time. But when you take a steep budget cut very quickly, you can't reduce the payroll fast enough. So it means your modernization and your readiness accounts suffer for a couple of years until you can right-size the force. So the instructions we got as we were going through this sequestration budget bill, which was built upon the previous Gates budget reductions, together is about $1 billion. The Army's share of that trillion dollars over the 10 years, about 500 from the first, 500 billion from the second, was 33%. We only make up 24% of the defense budget. So we got, as an institution, disproportionately reduced. The instructions from the Office of Secretary of Defense were, as you're balancing and reducing the Army, make sure that when you get out to 2019, that the Army is balanced, not hollow. And what they mean by that is that you've reduced your structure enough so that you have enough readiness dollars to be ready, and a smaller force has to be ready, and you have enough modernization dollars that you're not, at the end, have unmodernized equipment. And so what we did was we looked at the modernization budget, which a year ago, before I came into PA&E, I was in the force directorate that was in, we were along with our acquisition counterparts putting together the equipment budget. And the equipment budget is three bins, S&T, development and modernization, and procurement. And we decided that we're going to protect the future seed corn, which is S&T. We weren't going to take a procurement holiday in a traditional sense of stop buying stuff for the force today, but where we're going to take the risk and procurement was in development of new systems. And hence you saw the ground combat vehicle, and then the navigators will talk about the impact that had on their portfolio. And so as we move forward and protect that stuff, that means incremental improvement to the systems you have today, rather than developing new platforms. We went through a budget review process within the Army that was compressed because we got the fiscal guidance in July and had a turn in the palm in September. Lots of stakeholders, lots of participation, and then we conducted a review within the office of the Secretary of Defense where they made changes and it went through CAPE, then it went through the three star programmers, which is all the services. We can get into more detail later, but up to the Secretary of Defense who finally made all the decisions on all the different pieces. And it's a transparent process, but like any budget process in the Department of Defense, right? Everybody has a say, but in the end, when the decisions made, there are very few people who come out actually happy, right? I mean, especially when you're taking away that much amount of money, right? There's lots of compromise and lots of give and take. And so as part of the discussion was Aviation Restructuring Initiative. And so for the details of that, I'll turn it over to Frank Tate who'll tell you how the aviation piece fit within the broader restructuring of the Army. Thank you, sir. And again, thank you, Marin, and CSIS for giving us this opportunity. It's good to see so many familiar faces out there. As Joe Ferrari has said, one of the one of the biggest challenges as we go through the sequestration budget is for Army Aviation, because Army Aviation is such a large percentage of the overall Army budget. I manage the equipping dollars for Army Aviation. And so I'll use that as one example. If you take a pre sequestration, 12, 16 palm numbers and compare those to the 15, 19 palm, we go from seven and a half billion dollars a year and equipping dollars in the aviation portfolio down to four and a half billion dollars a year. That's a truly substantial percentage cut taken out there. And the Army Aviation is over 20 percent of the Army's total equipping budget. Correspondingly, though, if you look at our sustainment dollars and our training dollars, the Army Aviation is a huge portion of those as well. And we took upwards of 40 percent cuts in those areas. Because again, the chief and the secretary are limited in where they can take cuts from until such time as we start getting below 490,000 in terms of personnel. And so Army Aviation took a large portion of those cuts. And that's what drove us to look very carefully at how we would structure Army Aviation. The original proposal for how we would take those cuts was to cut five aviation brigades, three out of the active component and two out of the National Guard. Cut them entirely and every aircraft in them. And that meant Chinooks, Blackhawks, Apaches, even new LUHs that had been acquired. All of our best equipment was going to be divested out of the Army to pay this bill. And so as we took two steps back and took a second look at that, it made no sense whatsoever. We were going to cut combat power, cut the pointy end of the spear to pay this short term bill and not solve any of the additional problems that we have in Army Aviation from our training fleet to our modernization and how we're going to continue to go forward. It made no sense. So we went back to the drawing board. And after going back to the drawing board, we sort of settled on four basic principles that we wanted to use as we went forward with Army Aviation. The first one being to provide a modernized, ready tailored aviation force. And the biggest part of that was let's keep all of our most modern, most capable, most survivable aircraft and equipment that we've taken all this time to build up and procure our Blackhawks, our Apaches and our Chinooks. And let's divest as much of the old legacy Vietnam era type equipment that we have, of which we have a lot and use that to pay the bill. So that was one of the fundamental principles that we went in here. The second was to develop and train 21st century aviation leaders. Much of the way we are training aviators today is still geared on the way we trained aviators coming out of Vietnam. And so we want to fundamentally relook that and stop training geared on the way systems were and aircraft were in those days and look more at the systems that we expect to have as we go forward. Multi-engine, glass cockpit, moving map, information dominance, bringing in UAV feeds, all those types of things or what we should start focusing aviators on right from the start. And then adapt aviation design for efficient and effective support. As we get smaller, we have to move aircraft around to where they can give the most benefit. Some low density, high demand assets like 864s, we end up moving all to the active component. But where we have now an opportunity to retain additional Blackhawks and move those into the reserve component, we do that where they are both incredibly useful in combat, but also tremendously useful to our states and to the homeland. And then lastly, enhance the efficiency of our sustainment. And again, we go from seven aircraft fleets down to four. Focus all of our dollars, all of our modernization and sustainment on four fleets rather than seven. So those are sort of the fundamental principles of what we do in the aviation restructure initiative. And I know in question and answer we'll get into some of the more details. But with that, I'll hand it off to Colonel John Lindsay. Thanks. We just wanted to give you a little bit of insight into one of the big ideas as we were formulating the plan last year and discussing some of these lines of effort, some of these big ideas, the idea of keeping our best stuff, keeping our most modernized equipment and imagining the future that we were going to live in 1520 years down the road. And one of the big ideas, of course, that we had and embraced was that we are moving toward an unmanned world, more towards an unmanned world, not completely unmanned, but certainly many of our systems, both ground and air, are going to be unmanned. So we wanted to wrap our arms around our unmanned systems and see how we could best take advantage of that. And so that really gave us some thoughts about matching our shadow UAS systems with our Apache helicopters. Now, as many of you know, we have already planned on moving our gray Eagle capability to our divisions. And that's, that's important for for the army that plans underway. We're going to have those companies resident in our aviation brigades for safety and standardization purposes, although it'll be a divisional asset, but matching that capability with our Apaches is was recognized as important long ago. But what we took advantage of with the aviation restructure initiative was again, the army's original plan of divesting shadow UAS systems, due to the downsizing or reorganization of our brigade combat teams, those assets, those UAS platforms would have otherwise been divested from the inventory. And so we took those systems. And the big idea is to put them in the hands of the people who are going to get the most use out of them, give us give the army lessons about how to employ and utilize those systems, we're going to learn a great deal from those folks. Once they have that capability in their hands, again, we'll have a company per each battalion cavalry squadron in each divisional CAV or divisional combat aviation brigade or aviation brigade, I should say. So I think that's that's a that's a start on on on the on the structure. And Frank will talk a little bit about the manned unmanned teaming aspect of that. So in the end, we had to take tremendously difficult cuts in army aviation, very large cuts because we're such a large percentage of the budget. But by restructuring, we found a way to take those cuts, take 23% cut in the active about 8% net cut in the National Guard as an example. But do so while increasing our capability in the homeland and for the states, increasing our overall manned unmanned team capability, teaming capability, and still meeting the preponderance of our overall requirements, especially those war fighting and MCO requirements. And that was what most important to us. So we keep all 690 of the Army's acquisition objective of age 64 ease all 2135 UH 60s, all 533 CH 47s, all of our best combat power we retain despite taking these difficult cuts. Thanks to all of you for a good opening laying the groundwork of some of the issues that you were thinking about. I do want to make sure that we have lots of time for questions because I know there are a number of them out there. One of the things we wanted to do in putting this together was offer an opportunity for the public to ask questions because while this is there's been a lot of press coverage and hearings and the like, I think much less opportunity for give and take with the people who put the plan together. So I want we'll open this up in a minute. I also want to tell people out there watching on the web. If you have questions that you would like for me to ask, please send them to me at mleed at csis.org. And I can try to keep track of them up here and ask them as we go. Let me start with a couple of questions. First, I want to take it back to the future a little bit. I mean, so you had a plan for modernizing aviation, presumably now that you have consolidated your fleet into the most modern capabilities, that plan has shifted somewhat. So I think sort of the next step was the joint multi role and then the future vertical lift. So and Lieutenant General Phillips, the outgoing military deputy to the assistant secretary of reacquisition has talked about the importance of in particular joint heavy lift. But so how does the restructuring initiative affect the future of our aviation aviation beyond the current fleet? That's a great question. Because what aviation restructure does is salvages our plans to modernize the aviation fleet. Where we were headed was down a dark road for aviation, where we could not afford to continue to modernize and certainly not afford to continue to modernize across all of our components. And here's what I mean by that. When we were trying to keep seven fleets alive, we were going to have to spend so much money to do that, that we were lowering our rates of procurement on our biggest systems. For instance, Apache and Blackhawk as we go forward, pushing those programs all the way out to the end of the 2030s before we buy those programs out, which in turn then increases the money that we had to spend on sustainment of the UH 60 alphas and UH 60 lemas. All of those increased bills take away from our ability to spend money on future vertical lift, ITEP engine, and things of that nature. What happens is, you know, there's a lot of industry here as I look out there, all right, and they will be the first to explain to you that there's an economic order rate that if you go below your costs start to rise exponentially. If I'll take Blackhawk as an example, if I can buy a Blackhawk at $16 million for a mic model at this rate, but now I can only afford to buy it at this rate and now they're $23 million apiece. I'm getting the exact same mic model Blackhawk. I'm just paying a lot more money for it over a lot more years, and I'm sustaining the old alpha model for longer. All the money that that takes out of the programs is the money that's going to buy us future vertical lift. And so by consolidating into these smaller numbers of fleets and consolidating all our dollars, which we were able to do, General Odeirno has allowed us to keep the money in aviation. We didn't become a big bill payer for everything else. So those modernization dollars we kept, but now we're able to get back on track for those key modernization systems. So additionally, so last year I sat on the Joint Capabilities Board that feeds the JROC, and I sit on the FVL Executive Steering Group. And so we ensured as we structured that program in the timelines that it was synchronized with the changes we in the Army were making. So there were some people that wanted to start the analysis of alternatives and the milestone acquisition decisions start the program for FVL right away. But given the dramatic cuts we couldn't afford it. And so what we did was approve the initial capabilities document in draft, right? So that had never been done before. Normally it comes in and it gets approved, but it was improved in draft only to allow industry. And remember we talked about protecting the S&T. So as the budgets were coming down, we protected this technology demonstration that we're running that will help inform the cost analysis and the requirements for FVL. And we're looking sometime out in 2017 to really take that effort, marry it together with the analytics, and then begin the process of doing that. So it's a different way of running the program where normally you would start off at the milestones and then do the cost analysis. But if you don't understand the trade off between cost and requirements, right, that's where programs generally go off the rails for cost. So what we're trying to do is use this time now where we don't have a lot of money to get the S&T and the technology straight to inform a better decision on the FVL in the 2017-2018 time frame. One of the most, the aspects of the proposal that I think has garnered the most attention has been with respect to the Apaches. And so I wanted to ask two questions about that first. Some questions raised about the utility of the Apaches for the Scout Commission. And second, the disagreement between, or the apparent disagreement between the active component and the guard about whether or not it's appropriate to have all the Apache capability solely reside in the active. So if I could ask you guys and then I'll open it up for questions to the audience. So before we jump into the Apache, right, I think it's important, right, everybody does highlight where there's a disagreement. We don't talk enough about where the process came together, where both components and with OSD came together to work out where we agree, right. So first off, Frank talked to you about the reductions initially, right, had the National Guard losing two aviation brigades and the active duty was losing three, right. So as part of the deliberative process, right, it was brought to our attention that the Guard wanted to retain their aviation brigades. That was important to them. And so we worked out where as part of this restructuring, they get to keep their brigades and in the reserve component, which is the Guard plus the Army Reserve, right, we started with 12 aviation brigades, we're going to end with 12 aviation brigades. Those aviation brigade headquarters will be the same in all components and they can task organize then just like we fight. Also LUH, right. So initially we as part of the restructuring plan, the light utility helicopters, 100 from the active, we're going to go to Fort Rucker and 100 from the National Guard, we're going to go from Fort Rucker, right. During the deliberative process with OSD, right, the decision was made by the Secretary of Defense that in this year in FY 15, we're going to buy 50 or 55 additional LUHs so that the Guard doesn't lose that and if sequestration is avoided in the President's plan next year, we'll buy out the remainder so the Guard doesn't have to lose any LUH yet we still meet the requirement for 200. If full sequestration comes into effect and we're stuck at $120 billion, then we can't afford to buy those last 45 and those will have to move. But the intention is, right, and that dropped the number of helicopters the Guard was going to lose from over 200 down to 111. The other thing was the modernization of the UH 60s, right, that getting the Alpha models out and modernizing them and getting the most modern aircraft to the Guard. This plan enables that. It enables that as the aircraft are passed to the National Guard from the active component, those 111, they will be modernized aircraft. It also enables the Black Hawk program to continue to incrementally to be funded so that we can continue the modernization at a faster rate and buy out those things. So we'll talk about the Apaches but there's a large part of the plan in give and take where so the plan started as an Army plan, Total Force, went into the review. The National Guard came in with a counter-proposal. It went through lots of machinations, lots of reviews internally to DoD and then came out a different plan and that's how the budget process works. And I'll let Frank talk about the Apaches. Thanks, sir. Let's talk first about your first part of your question which is the capability of the UH 64 to perform the scout role. There's a few old dogs out there that might be saying, hey, I used to fly Alpha model Apaches and it just wasn't suitable to be a scout and those kinds of things. But what I can tell you is all that changed in 2007 when 1st to 82nd became the first unit equipped with the MTADS or the modernized target acquisition and designation system. Under the command of at the time Lieutenant Colonel Dave Fee they were part of the brigade that I also commanded a battalion at the same time during the surge in Iraq. And the MTADS was the game changer because it is the best site that we have on any of our Rotary Wing helicopters out there today, far superior to what we currently have on the Kiowa Warrior and therefore gives a far superior scouting capability in that regard. But then when you double that by adding in teaming with unmanned systems which we will continue to modernize and improve and develop TTPs for, that's where you really get this energy to have the best capable scouting aircraft team on the battlefield. And this was validated after we canceled the armed Constance helicopter program and conducted an analysis of alternatives about how we were going to go forward. And in that analysis of alternatives published in 2011 it was determined that the best capability shy of building something from scratch was to team a 64Es with unmanned systems. That was the best way of all the system to include and improved Kiowa Warrior, teamed with unmanned systems. It was the Apache Echo model with unmanned systems. So we were very comfortable and confident that this is the best capability out there and that not only that with the now having for the first time organic man unmanned teaming all the way down to the cab troop level that we're going to develop TTPs that far exceed what we've even had success with in theater already. So that's the first piece is in terms of the capability. I think the second piece you ask about though is this idea of well isn't it good to have you know that capability within the reserve component. The issue there is not whether there's some benefit to having it in the reserve component. The issue there is again low density, high demand. There's only going to be 690 Echo model Apaches. Alright anything beyond that now we're getting into increasing what the Army has to procure and to buy beyond what we program for. So if there's only 690 remember we're going from 37 shooting battalions if you will right now. 37 either attack battalions or armor constant squadrons in the Army today down to 22. Down to 22 and with only 22 when you put that into any of your track modeling or anything else the only way to fulfill the MCO requirements in combat is if those reside within the active component where they both maintain a higher study of readiness to begin with and then if there is a longer duration fight and we are hoping for their ability to turn more rapidly into that fight meets the demand. If we were going to have still 30 or 35 battalions then it would be ideal to continue to spread some of that into the reserve component. But at only 22 battalions they've got to be in the active component. Let me open up to the audience. If people could raise their hands if they have questions they'll come around with mics please identify yourselves. Be brief if you could and and if I also forgot to mention if people have cell phones on I think it turns those off. Also if people want to tweet us questions they can do that at at CSIS GRND forces so feel free to. So just raise your hands if you've got questions otherwise I'll keep firing away from up here. Just one up here. Hi Jen Judson with Inside the Army. I know that there is a National Guard Bureau counter-proposal circulating on the Hill right now and I know you sort of started to touch on the argument as to why some of these counter-proposals may not work but I'm wondering if you could elaborate on why this specific one that has been circulating over this past week does not work for the Army. Right I'll let Frank and John get into the details but their proposal right takes risk in the number of aircraft and where those aircraft are delivered or our station because you need you only have 690 and Frank will will run you through the distribution of those aircraft under our plan and under the counter-proposal and why that results in in our belief it results in a less ready force. The second thing is cost right so so their proposal in part of their proposal is there would be 60 UH 60 aircraft that that would have to be divested so our intent is as part of restructuring is not to divest those so there's higher operating costs and the last piece is the collective training capability Frank talked about the UAVs but but it's but it's more than that it is true that in their proposal you would have more battalions of a H64's right specifically there would be six in the National Guard and they would provide you individually trained pilots because we only resource in the net for the National Guard in a 10-year period right their resource to be an individual crew squad for about six of those 10 years at platoon level for about two of those years and then the other two at company level so that's what that's what they train at and that's what we resource them and for those helicopters that takes a significant amount of days for them to accomplish right so what what we didn't want to do with our proposal was to have more units we focused on was the capability that combined arms capability it's taking the Apache battalion that's trained at the battalion level teaming it so that it can train together with the UAVs teaming it with the reconnaissance battalion of Apaches so they can train together teaming it with the maneuver unit with the fires unit in a division headquarters right one of the things that that as I've been going through this right that what I've learned right as we learn more about the guard is they talk about how they bring the equipment and the organizations to where the people are and that is a significant strength for our nation because that retains a lot of capacity in the active force we bring the people to the organizations and the equipment right two different models when put together make us an extremely powerful and effective force as we found over the past ten years each model has its strengths each model has its weaknesses and as you look at the force mix there are certain capabilities that are in the reserve component and certain capabilities that are in the active component Patriot right Patriot is a hundred percent in the active and so for the Apaches what we're looking for out of these attack battalions is that integrated teaming with the UAVs the ground forces all at the same location so that we can get a collective capability in support of the divisions the other thing it aids is the training the collective training of that division because under their proposal the active component would be short to battalions and so I'll let Frank walk through the details of the actual aircraft count and the cost thanks sir the main issues with the guard counter proposal are that first it does not meet the war fighting demand it's a lower performance based on the ability as we said the initial readiness and then the ability to continue to turn and the fact that we turn away to assault battalions and it requires that the active cut even deeper so right now we're at a 23% cut and we would continue to cut two more attack battalions out of the active component leaving two of our divisions without a full AC for aviation brigade and again when you model that even with the additional battalions within the guard it underperforms by 12% the ability to meet our MCO demand so that's first the second then is the overall capability remember there's only 690 helicopters so to make extra battalions out of those same 690 helicopters there's only one way that that's done and that is to assume away the requirement for an or for an operational reserve float now a lot of people don't fully understand what an or if is and therefore they have this vision in their mind of a flight line somewhere with 67 perfectly good Apaches sitting there dying to be used with no aviators and no force structure on them because we just want to have them just in case but that's not how an or forks that's not how this works remember that we are currently building these age 64 ease using re-manufactured age 64 these right so every single one of them right now are going to have to be re-manufactured re-manufactured age 64s are in the 20 million dollar range brand new new metal age 64 ease are in the 45 plus million dollar range fully burden cost is what I'm talking about okay so we're doing all the re-manufactured because in case I didn't mention it we lost a lot of money so we're going to go the cheapest route possible to get to the 690 with that 690 I've got here in front of me what we've programmed for in the 15 19 palm for instance in FY 17 we hope to re- manufacture 69 aircraft in FY 18 we'd like to re-manufacture 72 aircraft we would like to negotiate for my friends here from Boeing a multi-year contract with you at a floor of the economic knee in the curve of at least 48 so that every year across the multi year we're getting at least 48 per year but for all of those numbers that means you have that many D models that you are taking off of a flight line if you don't have an orf and you are putting into the re-manufactured line and oh by the way we also at any given time have around 10 that are at our depots you know that we crashed and damaged and now we're going to try and put Humpty Dumpty back together again and it takes a year or two in some cases to do that and so when you put it all together we've got a requirement for anywhere from 55 to 80 something aircraft that are in some form of re-manufactured or rebuild and therefore unavailable on a flight line and so when you build extra battalions out of orf aircraft you are building ghost battalions you're building empty battalions with no readiness no utility and no capability and that is not the kind of how force that we want we want trained and ready in the ari plan we end up with 67 orf aircraft 67 and I told you how many we need for re manufactured just over some of the next years so there will be some years where we will still have small holes potentially on the flight line but that's why the guard proposal for us does not meet the needs of the war fight it is slightly more expensive it's a lot more expensive if we then have to procure an orf above and beyond right now it's true that we have about 40 more D models today than the 690 requirement so there is 40 there that we could help put into remanufactured to help us with that but we continue to a trip anywhere from two to five patches a year and so that number is going to continue to go down over the next 10 to 15 years to finish the procurement of the age 64e before we end up at our final destination of 690 echo model patches that answer your question what I want to make sure is this is not about the capabilities of the individual Apache pilots or the Apache units in the guard who have all served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and enormously proud and should be of what they've done the same thing with the United States Army reserve so we have right now as we speak it in Kentucky a U.S. Army reserve Apache unit is transitioning to UH 60s now if you went out there and asked them would they have rather stayed age 64 pilots they're proud age 64 pilots but they know that the needs of the nation are for them to transition to that aircraft and they're staying with the unit and they're going to get the resources and they're going to get modern aircraft and they're going to be an important part of the war fight so when done army aviation will have a greater percentage of its helicopters in the reserve component than in the active force than when we started when it's done most of the aircraft disproportionately are coming out of the active component it's just how we mix those aircraft and according to you know rams got a good report out that says the the most cost effective aircraft for the reserve component are those that are the Chinooks and the Blackhawks because of the complexity and expenses they're the most expensive ones to keep in the reserve component and so if you're going to pay the incremental cost the extra cost for the pilots in the active component right it makes sense from a cost perspective which is where I come from to put the the least cost effective aircraft in the active and instead of the other way around and other questions or I'll I'll pile on a little bit okay we've got two right here we'll go in the back first and then come up Michael Tint I just wanted to ask if you could explain a bit more about the the changes in training and you seem seem to buy that you're gonna be saving money in the process of changing the training routines and especially interested in hearing about that so your question is about the LUH 72 in the training base okay yeah so yeah so let's start with the LUH 72 and that the idea the big idea here is that we are divesting in the in the army the total 798 aircraft so that's that's where we have to start of aircraft that we're flying today 798 go away the big idea with the training base the LUH 72 was to take aircraft that we already own both in the active component in the reserve component and put those aircraft down at Fort Rocker now the original plan was to take half about half of the National Guard's aircraft the LUH 72's and see the training base with those along with almost all of the active component LUH's as general Ferrari described we are going to procure at a cost of about six hundred million dollars a hundred additional LUH 72's that enable the National Guard to retain 212 aircraft so our requirement down at Fort Rocker is going to be on the order of a couple hundred LUH 72's the paradigm shift that we talked to folks about down at Fort Rocker that we think needs to take place is going from a single engine world to a dual engine world we have been flying single engine aircraft for a long time right and our experience in the training base was informed by our experience in in Vietnam and the question for a lot of our pilots a lot of our student pilots when we're flying wasn't one of when you're going to fall out of the sky it was or if you're going to fall out of the sky was when either by some hostile act or some kind of a malfunction because we did not have redundant systems as we moved into a dual engine universe down at the training base we did not make fully make the transition to the dual engine training paradigm so we still see a lot of the same things happening down at Fort Rocker in terms of training for failures that almost never happen in the real world right we don't really see too many dual engine failures out there so do we need to continue to put the resources and emphasis on that in the training base and we contend that there are some savings to be gained out there so the nature of flight school we think is going to change to a degree now basic training is basic training there's some fundamentals that you have to you have to address but we think it is far better to start out a student in a dual engine glass cockpit world which is the world that he's going to live in for the rest of his time in the army and the transition from LUH 72 into any one of our modernized glass cockpit aircraft UH 60 CH 47 or or patches is going to be much much easier so you want to talk a little bit about the the cost associated with because that's one of the things that comes up frequently I also want to add that again it's about efficiencies alright so keep in mind that when we only have four types of helicopters and one of them is also the trainer right so the LUH is the trainer but the National Guard will still have two hundred and twelve of those out there flying all over the fifty four states and territories and so every aviator that comes out of flight school will now be rated in fifty percent of the army's aircraft type and so all the additional transitions and things that we put through people later that all goes away you know an Apache pilot that comes out of flight school here in a year is also rated in the LUH and so if they want to get out and go into the guard for instance they don't have to get a transition they already fly two hundred and twelve of the guards helicopters so you gain a lot of efficiencies associated with that stop training people to fly helicopters they're never going to see again in their life is part of what we're looking at there now the LUH is more expensive to operate than a th 67 or you know equivalent type aircraft there's no question about that however the cost of operating the LUH will go down as we pull a hundred of them out of the active component where they're on small contract based maintenance all over the army and now you can solidate into one larger contract at Rutgers so that lowers your cost plus the op tempo for the LUH goes up so that the parts procurement goes down somewhat so we will lower the overall operating costs for all of our LUH's but they'll still be more than what it was for a th 67 however we also expect that when we stop spending a large portion of the first half of flight school teaching people to line up on lane seven and do yet another touchdown auto rotation to the ground that you can in fact reduce the overall length of that stage of flight school and so all of that is something that rucker is working through right now is what the new program of instruction will be as we have this complete paradigm shift into the modern world and I notice we have some international officers here in Australian uniforms inspired me to mention that we took lessons from what we saw in Australia where they've already done this and gotten away from the touchdown auto rotation world the Germans who already use the EC 135 as their primary training helicopter which is a slightly earlier version of the LUH so one of the things we did was look out at the rest of the world and how are other people teaching their young aviators how to fly or I George Nicholson a policy consultant for special operations when you look at Medevac operations that are being conducted a few years ago when Secretary Gates went to Afghanistan and saw the inability to meet the one-hour time frame he looked at the Air Force H 8 60 sitting there and say why can't they be used and General Nordy Swartz the Chief of Staff the Air Force agreed but what's happening right now is the air rescue capability when the Air Force has not done a single rescue since 1972 it's been done by special operations command or the Marines the Air Rescue Association is saying well we're better qualified than the Army we're the force of choice in Afghanistan right now if they want to be rescued because the Army can't return fire they're having to wait for an accompanying aircraft they don't have Flair is the Army doing anything to solve that problem okay not really part of the aviation restructuring issues so I'll just be very brief and saying that the Army takes nothing more serious than our Medevac capability one of the things that we've done is we've expanded that capability and quantity both on the ground in theater and overall we have expanded the training for our medics so the back-enders we have introduced the ability to issue blood products to you know are severely wounded individuals you know and introduce that now into the into our programs for teaching our medics you know so we continue to grow that capability all of the medevac that were in theater are now equipped with Flair so we have that Flair capability as well so I think we've we've addressed that very well and gotten after that golden hour and shown the dedication led by many key leaders in the Army over the last several years as well as Secretary Gates to to address that capability I also just add we did a interview with one of the commanders on the ground right now of a cabin in Afghanistan who specifically addresses what he's doing for Medevac and we'll be posted on our website the next week or two I think one last comment on that we've got as you probably follow over 50 medevac aircraft downrange in more than a you know lots of different locations and one of the things I have to do on behalf of the Army is submit a report every month to the Secretary of Defense through the Secretary of the Army to Secretary of Defense about the number of missions that are flown out of standard outside of the the golden hour if you will and happy to say that we are 99% of the time well within compliance even as our assets are stretched so we think the assets we have in theater are doing remarkably better than we were at the onset back to the training question Rudy Ostovic she's Command Fort Rocker at the time that we wrote the initial requirement for what is today the training helicopter in those days it was very important for us to have a light single-engine helicopter because cost was a big deal and we were eating up about 25% of the Army's flying our program at Fort Rocker training aviators training them how to become fundamental basic Army aviators and then they transition into more sophisticated aircraft cost is still a big issue as we just heard all morning long it sounds as if the Army has come to a decision that there's a new requirement for training helicopter you described it as dual-engine glass cockpit modern systems and I hear that we're going to buy about a hundred you 870 twos at a cost of 1.3 billion dollars what surprises me is that we haven't gone through the discipline process of crafting a new training helicopter requirement and then putting that out to industry for full and open competition so it seems as if we're about to spend over a billion dollars to take no longer existing helicopters but actually buy a hundred new helicopters without fair and open competition I know you've thought through that but I think the audience needs to understand your rationale thanks sir appreciate that I'm not sure we got your numbers on the cost they're significantly inflated from what we're actually going to have to pay for those helicopters so that's first of all second of all they remember the original concept here was take aircraft that we already own already pay to fly move those to Fort Rucker and use those helicopters as has been an army tradition for many years John and I learned to fly in the venerable UH-1 Iroquois that the army already owned there was no competition for that training helicopter we took them we moved in Fort Rucker and we used them a few years later we did the same thing with OH-58 Alpha Charlie's and moved them to Fort Rucker no competition we used what we already owned and we use that until such time as we eventually did by the TH-67 helicopter so following in that same model of using what we already own because we didn't have the money to go out and buy anything else that was the model now as we said as National Guard address their concerns to the Secretary Defense going through this process one of the things that they said was hey we're really not happy about losing the LUH's that we have we believe we have a firm requirement for two hundred and twelve LUH's and we really want to use them they're spread across so many states and territories and they made that argument and so as a compromise Secretary of Defense agreed and said alright here's what we're going to do we are going to allow you to keep all two hundred and twelve of your LUH's as a compromise we will in turn come back to the Army and not force the Army to buy but rather give us money additional money to procure the extra hundred LUH's that make up essentially the reserve component half of the training fleet and they did that as a compromise that is a directive requirement to us to go ahead and do that but again going out in free and open competition only for the hundred would now create two training helicopters it also would add another fleet of aircraft it would also get back into the qualifying people on aircraft they will never fly again and complicate our overall problem we want to lean down to four fleets and four fleets only and focus every dollar we have on keeping those four fleets relevant and capable for the future it's important on the cost right so as which is one of my big concerns obviously when you have more aircraft the logistics burden of supporting that and and training on it becomes enormous so while it appears that putting the LUH on its face a more expensive than what we got when you take the hundred that we already own so those are zero cost you put them there they were already flying so we were already paying to fly them and you put them there so you take that money and move it and you get rid of the entire cost for the fleet that's there right it turns out to be an enormous cost savings and then when you're able to do what John and Frank talked about which is shorten the flight training and not introduce another aircraft but bring more LUH in so that if because if you brought in a new trainer you'd have to train those pilots who go on that trainer to go on the LUH to go to the guard right you have to run transition course so so it makes that's why we did it is we're buying what we already own and using the aircraft we already own to avoid the cost of buying a new fleet so if I could make one comments or on the the fact that we're getting smaller the army's getting smaller that's one of the things that we had to contend with in inside the building and outside the building is that the idea and the acceptance of the fact that we're going from 490 to 450 or less and what that means in terms of cuts everyone thinks that those 40,000 people that delta between 490 and 450 is somebody else's somebody else's organization or unit or asset and fact of the matter it is for the aviation restructure we're going to reduce as general Ferrari said from 25 brigades down to 22 or less and when you do that you reduce flight school you reduce flight school from a high last year of 1300 students going through down to what will probably be a steady state of about 900 students a year thank you sir Dave would I'm a former guard combat aviation commander just just I know that with the x-word that transferred the age 64s out of the US a are to the to the active duty they were basically they got a one-for-one exchange now as I understand it with transitioning eight ARBs out of the guard 111 aircraft probably aren't a one-for-one exchange but I'm curious as to you talk about these being modernized airframes are these going to be alphas lemas mics what what kind of aircraft are we expecting to get thank you okay thank you that's a great question I'm glad you mentioned the x-word that is transferring from the US AR to the active their patches because that x-word are actually transferred to from the US AR and as general Ingram agreed to last April over a year ago and before restructure began it also transfers to battalions out of the National Guard that just had not begun yet and the same one-for-one type deal okay and so then there's the remaining 61 aircraft that you also get and again we're getting smaller so they can't all continue to be a one-for-one as we go but there's an overall growth in the National Guard of 111 now as to what type of aircraft they will all be UH 60 lemas okay so the Army has over 700 alpha models still that we are working aggressively across all compost to get out of the fleet and that's where again this by focusing on just four types of aircraft we increase the rate of production and procurement of UH 60 mics which will benefit the National Guard so they can continue to push alpha models out and these lemas which will go in to fill the new four structure right the two battalions that are complete swaps that were already agreed to as well as some of the new four structure that is built based on the new design in the National Guard those will all already be lemas so that we can continue to focus on getting rid of alpha models all right and we've briefed this the National Guard Bureau in terms of great detail of where these lemas come from all right but the beauty of this plan there's some understandable concern from some folks in the National Guard that oh yeah we've heard this before sure we're gonna give you some black Hawks and take some Apaches so you'll come take the Apaches and then two three years later maybe we start seeing some black Hawks but again remember we are using aircraft that we already own I'm not waiting on anything to come off a production line to be able to hand over these lemas so the commitment from day one has been that they will both be lemas and that we will be able to deliver said lemas either simultaneous or ahead of the taking away of any of the age 64's does that make sense thank you good question and as far as far as the structure right so the guard structure in the plan both for sequestration on their president's plan comes down at a less of a rate than the active structure so it's 14% under full sequestration for the active force 10% for the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve and it's about eight and four under the president's plan the eight and four gets you a 980,000 person army which consists of 450,000 the active 335 in the Army National Guard 195 right so that allows but by not taking the structure out proportionally it allows the guard to have those structures and maintain those eight aviation brigades and then the battalions and how they sort out those UH 60s they can reallocate from from across the states and that structure will be there for them to do that once again right the pilots that are out there in these units are extraordinarily you know they're great citizens they have jobs they fly a tremendous amount of time to stay proficient and we want to take advantage of their dedication and expertise and so that's why we've reduced them dramatically less than the active component so that we can leverage their unique capabilities and their dedication. Mike Miller with Raytheon staying in the vein of efficient use of what you already have when ARI was first rolled out there was some reporting that using the apaches in the scout role was an interim solution it wasn't a purpose build aircraft for that mission if that's true does the Army intend to revisit excuse me the requirement to develop a new armed aerial scout aircraft and if so was that timeline look like. Thank you that's a great question one of the things that we said throughout this process is that the Army retains the requirement for an armed aerial scout that is still a valid requirement it will be filled in this ARI plan with a teaming of the age 64e and the UAV we do not have the money today to go forward on an armed new build armed aerial scout program that could change and thus we keep the requirement as we we think it's a significant and important requirement but right now we don't have the avenue to pursue that directly however there are some interesting things out there in industry that are being looked at that could get after an armed aerial scout type requirement we are still looking at what we're doing about our little bird in our soft community for replacement there and so if certain things happen maybe associated with the joint multi role or the future vertical lift that produce something that is affordable i.e. no more expensive than what we pay for a reman age 64 then we could relook at what our options are but we don't have the money today to go after that in a fully funded program if that makes sense morning gentlemen can you briefly address the restriction of aerial can you identify yourself quickly sorry pardon me by yourself oh richard ronkey can you just briefly discuss restriction of manned aerial ISR and a follow-up to it is a cocoa contractor on contractor operative and significant recently in past ten years on the QRC function is there any role for cocoa in the future that's really best answered by some some of our UAS folks and our G2 partners and you know as far as the aviation restructure initiative goes we haven't really delved into the fixed wing platforms at all this is really a rotary wing specific initiative and leaves the ISR plan as it has been rolled out intact so there's no no no changes to that per se I can put you in I can talk to you offline and let's let's get you in touch with the right people to answer what questions you have about the ISR plan okay I'm the other Mike Miller from Bell Helicopter and I'd like to follow up on AAS you know you stated that we're retaining that as a requirement but you've divested yourself in the aviation restructure initiative from single-engine aircraft you're going to twin-engine trainers are you going to expect the AAS to be a twin-engine aircraft that's not absolutely a requirement it would be desirable for all of the same reasons that twin engines are desirable to start with in terms of their survivability and combat capability lift capability etc but it is not necessarily a requirement what we know is is that all of our existing air frames in a in ari are going to be twin-engine if we it so it makes sense for the trainer to be geared towards what everybody is flying if we did at some time in the future make a decision to go to a single-engine platform and some small numbers then we would have to adjust how that individual platform was trained but it does not change our overall training concept any any other questions right now from folks okay let me dive in on a couple questions if i could outside of the ari there's been increased reporting of the army increasing its efforts to try to operate rotorcraft off of ships so can you talk a little bit about where that's heading and how you plan to deal with the reorganization challenges associated with that what's the what's the future look like so i can start and i'm sure colonel tatel chime in on on this one as well it is true we have delved into our shipboard capability our maritime capability it's a it seems to be a growth capability we do sense that there is increasing demand out there in fact we have ongoing missions happening in sent com as well as other places in the in korea so there is a and and the folks in hawaii work closely with the navy the question in my mind and we've relayed this to the folks out there at our accs is that we've got to make sure that we've got the appropriate demand signal coming in from our combatant commanders we want to make sure that that is that that is in fact the case and so that that will focus our efforts in a world of limited resources and that's really one of the concerns that we have is that you know how much maritime capability do we need does the army need to to invest in certainly some is the answer but what's the right amount and we right now we're working in 12 places like 12th aviation aid in in italy and as i said hawaii and korea and those are forays those are those are those are experiments and in some cases limited operational capabilities that are being developed but in terms of what the long-term maritime capabilities are in terms of demand for the army i think that we still have some work to do i want to talk a little bit about hawaii sure first of all i'd like to point out that the army's been doing maritime operations off of us navy warships for a very long time i was in 417 cav back in the day in the early 90s a unit that was initially formed as a special operations unit flying off of the backs of the short deck frigates and various platforms around the world we enforced the embargo of Haiti in the early 90s again off the back of short deck frigates with those kia warriors we ultimately occupied Haiti out of helicopters coming off of us navy aircraft carriers from the 10th aviation brigade we have special operations that routinely operate off so the army is not new to this idea of maritime operations and shipboard operations there are challenges associated with it and i think you mentioned already the issue of the salt water and the corrosion control as a matter of fact we're getting ready to have a conference down at redstone to talk more about that and what things the army may or may not need to do to improve that but a lot of it just comes down to the discipline of fresh water rinses in your turbine engines after every single flight fresh water rinses of the entire aircraft you know i lived at sea for months off the coast of Haiti and you know as long as we did those things we're able to take care of the aircraft so we can conduct maritime operations and i think that especially as the army is increasingly conus based the ability to project power off of naval platforms as is just one more important quiver or arrow in the quiver if you will for the u.s. army in the pacific theater in particular there's a lot of interest with that and the 25th combat aviation brigade that i used to command is an ideal unit to continue to develop those tactics techniques and procedures because that unit already operates within 10 nautical miles of saltwater every single day which means they're already dealing with all those corrosion issues they already have all the appropriate equipment in terms of helicopter emergency egress devices they all we have a dunker there in Hawaii so they're all dunker certified you know and you happen to have pearl harbor and a giant naval fleet there so perfect place to continue to work those tactics techniques and procedures and obviously the pacific theater has a lot of ocean as well as though a lot of land mass and a lot of the largest armies in the world so it's a great marriage of our maritime capability with our army capabilities and so with respect to those other armies can you talk a little bit about how you see and this may be more a question for you john about the role of army aviation in regional airline forces but one of the interesting initiatives that we have underway in the army is the idea of a aviation mobile training team which is an idea that matches some of our aviation expertise that we will pull out of our both institutional organizations as well as our aviation brigades across forces command and other places around the world in order to marry them up with other nations based on requests for specific kinds of training assistance and that is sort of a hybrid model that is not permanent but it is ad hoc in nature task organized based on the requirements that come into us so that's just one of the ideas that I think is out there that's not specifically regionally aligned forces regionally aligned forces for for army aviation is probably the best example we have is the first infantry division and the work that's going on in several places throughout africa and again these are small organization tailored for very specific missions and I think that the the model that aviation will fall in on is going to be very similar to what the army is doing with their brigade combat teams any other questions from the audience okay I think we might let you guys go home early thanks very much to all three of you for coming over really appreciate it thank you all for taking the time and we look forward to having you back in future sessions on rotorcraft take care