Army airmobility - Challenges for army armaments

摘要

The requirement for airmobility is not new for Army armaments. Army armament efforts have long been focused on enabling Army Aviation and infantry forces, especially paratroopers, to operate together; in the process, all relevant interdependencies have been taken into account accordingly. Thus, there arernno fundamentally new requirements regarding the products to be procured for airmobility, i.e. helicopters and vehicles. The actual challenge for Army armaments is rather to synchronise the delivery of the respective products.rnOn the one hand, delivery is affected by scarce funds and, on the other, by delays resulting from the huge coordination requirements associated with multinational projects. In addition, industry sometimes fails to reach development objectives in time so that timernand cost schedules need to be adapted. Moreover, lessons learned on ongoing operations may call for functional requirements to be adjusted or updated, which again causes delays.In such cases, as currently experienced with the UH Tiger and NH90 helicopters, different versions of the same system have to be used. This allows for training to begin at the earliest date possible, albeit by accepting higher efforts to ensure the logistic support-ability of the different versions.