Cost-Effective Helicopter Options for Partner Nations.

摘要

Department of Defense (DoD) assistance to partner nations often entails supporting their helicopter fleets. In some cases, these fleets are composed of nonstandard rotary-wing (NSRW) aircraft, usually Soviet-era or Russian, European, Chinese, or outdated American equipment. Partner use of NSRW aircraft poses particular problems for U.S. security cooperation activities; understandably, the U.S. military does not have a large base of expertise to support these aircraft in such areas as flight crew training, maintenance, and supply chain management. Recognizing these problems, DoD asked RAND s National Defense Research Institute to identify the aviation requirements of important partner nations, apply this understanding to an analysis of the relative efficiencies of a variety of helicopter platforms, and use these findings to quantify the cost-effectiveness implications of transitioning partner nation NSRW fleets to alternative aircraft. In this report we present the method and results of the second and third of these tasks. In this summary, we provide a brief synopsis of the analytical approach used to generate these results, then present our findings in greater detail. The first step of the RAND analysis was to set the scope of the cases to be included for analysis. We chose to focus particularly on the helicopter requirements of four key partner nations including Afghanistan and Iraq plus 29 others.