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I pray to God my son never has to step foot in a Russian-built aircraft.

My son is in Afghanistan and mentioned taking a ride in a Russian-built helicopter. I don't know the details of what he rode in, but the helicopters mentioned in the first post were designed for mountainous areas, and they are available within 5 months. If we waited on a US company to design a helicopter for those areas, it would cost 5 times as much, carry a third of the cargo/personnel, and wouldn't be available for a good 5-10 years, and probably would ultimately not be able to fly in those areas. The Russians/Soviets are a little better about keeping mission creep out of their designs, and so some of their weapons and systems are quite good as long as you use them for the situations they were designed for.

Russian helicopters do just fine in Afghanistan when they aren't being shot at with American-made missiles...