“Do you have an argument if you were to remove the talk of “boondoggle?””
Yeah, no 1., the military’s action in Iraq in not using the Ospreys in “combat” and the bureaucrats’ redefinition of combat zone to pretend the Ospreys are used in combat.
Of course they are not shot down, they don’t go near combat, and our current enemies don’t have intermediate range AA threat.
And how about the fact that senior Pentagon officials tried to dump it in the past, but it was saved by Bell and Boeing giving money to politicians?
It’s a political weapon system, not a battlefield one, but some pretense of it being the second has to be made for appearances purposes.
Sure....
Boondoggle by big business.......... It’s a conspiracy. All we need is updated ch53s and uh1s.
Chalk turn around times and speed, MANPADs, the threat from shore based anti ship missiles.......none of that matters; no, those are BS arguments by Boeing.
Imagine you’re the first chalk of an initial entry team waiting and hoping for more guys in green to arrive. Imagine your ship has to loiter close to shore in unsafe waters, imagine you can’t effectively overfly the
MANPADS threat......
The DoD is being cautious and prudent. You don’t want to rush into failure and have a F111 like scenario when they crashed because of a terrain following radar issue. The “capabilities” this platform brings are needed.
Hint, anything that takes off and lands vertically has issues, everything. Take a look at the maintenance on a normal helicopter, the crash statistics of a harrier........... It’s unstable, there is no glide ratio to speak of, you have vibration, everything is spinning in circles, the airframe is under constant torque on a helicopter and like all aircraft that try to do what they do a helicopter in general can’t compare in crash statistics to it’s fixed wing brethren. More things can go wrong, but does that mean we don’t need the capability to get into places like a helicopter can? You accept the risk.