As the U.S. Army sets out its plans to revolutionize its helicopter fleet under the FARA and FLRAA programs in the next decade what hasn’t been widely reported is the new tactics that commanders and pilots will introduce. With both programs citing speed as one of the critical advantages that they will bring to commanders it means that army pilots are adopting new ways of flying over the battlefield already. With both platforms offering speeds that outstrip anything in the current inventory pilots expect to conduct missions far deeper behind enemy lines than currently practiced or are limited to Special Forces units.
Major General David Francis, commander of the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker, Alabama, told an audience at the Association of the United States Army’s Global Force Next symposium that the service’s aviators must start preparing now for these new advancements in performance.
“It’s imperative that we make some fundamental changes in addition to the material piece. Because of the transformational capability that Future Vertical Lift will bring to our aviation forces, it’s going to change the way we fight.”
Fort Rucker is currently introducing new training scenarios whereby pilots are now flying within a large-scale combat environment as opposed to operating in smaller numbers in a counterinsurgency style operation as conducted in the Middle East for the last decade or more.
Francis said. “We are training our crews to fly low. … This is not new to Army aviation, but, quite frankly, it’s relatively new to this generation of Army aviation,” he said. “So, we are very deliberately training the force through training support packages to fly at terrain flight altitudes against radar threats that will enable us to survive, fight and win on future battlefields.”
Once the FLRAA or FARA winner is announced, the first unit to receive the models will require intense training to ensure that new tactics and planning become second nature and the capabilities of the platform are exploited to the fullest. Francis cited:
“New leaders coming into the service will have to be trained differently to fight in future conflicts. We are going to be operating in dispersed environments. We must train and sustain and conduct operations from a distributed kind of position to be able to converge effects at the time and place our choosing … and then be able to redisperse those forces and sustain them over time.”
Another proposal is to cross-train maintainers and operators to operate across multiple platforms and systems of both the FARA and FLRAA. Whether this will extend to aircrews seems unlikely.