This laughable statement illustrates the level of ignorance demonstrated by this article.
The Obama Administration is destroying our military and the Army is taking the biggest hits. This always happens when wars end, but Obama is taking it to new levels. The argument is how to allocate what little capability is going to be left. Since the Guard has become effectively another branch of service with their own 4-star advocate to go along with their allies in the Congress, you can expect these sorts of squabbles.
In the end, the argument is about jobs and prestige. Aviation is a jobs program in the Reserve Components. You need more full time maintenance personnel and aircrews must spend more time training and flying than their ground based counterparts. That means more full time jobs for Guardsmen. F-16's and Apache helicopters add prestige to a state's Guard establishment. Engineer battalions and cargo helicopters may be much more useful, but they aren't as sexy.
From the Army's perspective, they no longer have the money to replace their worn out reconnaissance helicopters, so the only viable option is to shift Apache's into that role. That what the Guard Apaches are going to be doing. It's not an elegant solution, but given the radical slicing of budget and force structure, it's about the only option available. Don't cry too much of a river for the Guard, their political agents will soften the blows.
This was predicted in 1979 in letter by Valerie Jarretts father in law discussing an Arab purchased Presidency.
Those 10 helicopters promised to Egypt..why? We need to keep our helicopters and protect our finances in America from this financial terrorist regime.
All true. The whole reasoning, ostensibly, is to have that force structure built into the Reserve Component as an economy of force measure for call up and deployment during wartime and that has occured and continues to happen. It’s much more complicated than that. Lots of politics, jobs, special interests, contractors, ad nauseum....This situation isn’t about some conspiracy to take armed attack helicopters out of states’ control for some domestic nefarious purpose. It’s easy enough and cheaper to equip off the shelf airframes and UAS platforms currently in use by FLEAS, state and local police. They don’t need Apaches to spray lead for crowd control.This is about the Army attempting to retain an aging and diminishing aircraft fleet to react to global deployments in the midst of the tear down reign of Obama.