After the last Shuttle flight coming up in July we will have to rely solely on the Ruskies to get to space. Now we have to buy helos from them that we could easily design, build and fly. Next thing you know we’ll be buying our fighter jets from them, too!
Meanwhile... SecDef Gates is cutting funding in most sectors of our military services, including new aircraft procurement. Anyone else miss the F-22 and its superiority? How about reducing the number of surface ships for our Navy? Then there’s Obama’s committment to reducing our nukes.
I’m sure Bell, Boeing and Sikorsky could build an aircraft to accomplish what the Russian aircraft now does. However, as someone else on this thread indicated, the bureacratic red tape that includes stuff like mandatory minority and women owned suppliers, excessive oversight and audits of every stage of development and testing, etc., the US products are extremely costly.