French Air Strikes in Mali

The French Air Force has released video of two air strikes on enemy positions in Mali.  The second appears to be a helicopter strike.  Don't know what type of ordnance was used in the first strike but it was BIG.  H/T David Cenciotti at The Aviationist. 

A brave new world for Army maintenance...

Hold the phones and stop the presses... the Army Research Laboratory has developed NEW aircraft maintenance technologies for the FAA.  

Before we send out the thank you notes, what exactly are these cutting edge and heavily researched technologies that our taxpayer-funded researchers hath wrought?  
The first one is the Health and Usage Monitoring System, or HUMS for short.  This quite valuable and capable system collects data from various sensors on helicopters which aims to predict impending failures of critical components.  It was developed by... wait for it... helicopter operators in the offshore oil industry.  And we have had it fielded in our civilian helicopter fleet for many years.

The second and even more technically advanced system that is sure to rock the civil rotorcraft industry is called "Condition Based Maintenance" or CBM.  For the less technically inclined, CBM means "replacing parts when they need to be replaced" which will eventually supercede the former Army system of "time-scheduled maintenance" or "replacing parts regardless of whether they need to be replaced".  

In practice, CBM states that you will regularly inspect certain components and replace them when necessary, while time scheduled maintenance means your maintainers spend countless man hours removing components at set times regardless of the condition.  Quite like changing your engine every 3,000 miles instead of changing the oil.  This is known in some quarters as "wasteful", "pointless" "stupid" and "a grievous waste of time and money".  

This is why civilian operators, with limited budgets and clients with limited patience, have been doing condition based maintenance for years, with strict governmental oversight.  

Some in the military will argue that time scheduled maintenance has historically been necessary because of the size of Army aircraft, the stress on components, the pace of operations, blah blah and so forth.  This argument works best on those who believe that the Army is the sole repository of aviation knowledge on the planet and think that an aircraft with 10,000 hours belongs on a pole in front of a museum.  

I would argue that the Army pays thousands of people millions of dollars to keep hundreds of aircraft broke most of the time, and that they are idiots with unlimited funding who think they know everything.  Regardless of how you might feel about this, I would bet you a paycheck that most civilian companies would be out of business by lunchtime if they managed maintenance like the Army.

I will further argue that the most outside-the-box thinkers in the Army probably brought these long standing civilian processes and systems under the Army umbrella, relabeled them with a cool sounding acronym, and then got themselves a nice OER bullet out of it.  

Glad to see the greatest minds in the Army are slowly catching up, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.  

Why Helicopter Design is Difficult

This short video of visualized airflow around a CH-47 in flight demonstrates the challenges facing rotary wing design engineers. The speaker, Dick Spivey, is considered to be the father of the V-22 program.  (H/T Rotor and Wing editor Andrew Parker for this).

By the Numbers

From the May 2012 Rotor and Wing, h/t Andrew Drwiega...


Some numbers mentioned during Sen Jeff Sessions' speech before the Army Aviation Association of America.  


Over the last three years...


- Defense spending has increased 10%.
- Medicare spending has increased 37%.
- Department of Education spending has increased 70%.


Food stamp spending has increased 300% since 2001.  


The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $1.3 trillion over the last ten years.  


The US budget deficit for LAST year was $1.3 trillion.  


In 1962, defense was 48% of the budget, while entitlement spending was 26%.  In 2013, defense will be 19% of the budget and entitlement spending will be 60%.  


The Department of Defense (DoD) budget is $688.3 billion out of a total Defense budget of $903.3 billion ($130 billion for vets, $43.8 billion for foreign economic aid, and $12.5 billion for foreign military aid).  


With continuing budget deficits each year exceeding $1 trillion, completely eliminating the DoD outright would not balance the budget.  


Guns or butter, take your pick.  

My Apologies

After President Obama's recent apology to Afganistan President Karzai for a koran burning incident in Afghanistan, I felt inspired to add a few apologies of my own.  
To President Hamid Karzai:


First of all, I am sorry that our country ever supported the Mujaheddin, of which you were a part, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  


I am even sorrier that we listened to you and supported you as President when you wanted the Taliban driven from your country in 2001.  


Since you were long in the habit of fleeing your own country when things got bad, I am particularly sorry that US forces assigned as your personal protection detail have saved your life from at least one assassination attempt that we know of.  


I am sorry that this koran burning is such a big deal, as the circumstances surrounding the incident are not widely known, but of course the US military is portrayed once again as the bad guy.  


I am deeply sorry that the burning of a few copies of the koran is a bigger deal to some of your people than murder.  


I am terribly sorry that your country, under your leadership, is so screwed up that your people have time to protest this, and that your leading exports to the world are terrorism and opium.  


I'm sorry to hear that your brother somehow got mixed up in the heroin trade, I'm sure its just a politically motivated smear campaign as he says.  


But most of all, I'm sorry that over 1800 US soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen have died in your country trying to clean the place up.  


Sorry, man.  Your bad.  


Check, please...

Safety Program or a Safe Program?

The point at which your safety program becomes irrelevant

There is a huge difference between having a safety program and operating safely.  The difference can mean life or death.  A few examples:

1. September 18th, 2008.  An Army National Guard helicopter crosses from Kuwait into southern Iraq for the first time since arriving in country for a nine month tour.  The organization at all levels has school trained safety officers, trained at the Army Safety Center at Fort Rucker, which believes (and practices) that enough micromanagement can achieve a zero accident rate in the Army.  There are safety conferences, safety meetings, safety councils, safety surveys, safety briefings, risk assessments, and safety is preached and drilled constantly during a months-long train up for the deployment.

But that evening, it doesn't matter, as inexperienced pilots take off in marginal weather into the dark featureless desert. Within minutes after crossing into country, the third aircraft in the formation, Red River 44, crashes into the desert floor at 130 knots, killing the crew and passengers.

2. April 20th, 2010.  BP has a great safety program, if not a great safety record.  Contract employees are subject to intensive interviews before being allowed to work for BP.  Many of these third party providers fail to live up to BP's safety standards.  New arrivals at BP facilities are shaken down for contraband.  Passengers must be escorted by approved escort personnel to aircraft that are shut down, no hot refueling, no hot passenger loading.  Safety is practiced well past the point of operational intrusion.  There are safety audits and safety consultants and safety inspections and safety meetings and long safety conventions, and awards and accolades given to the safest of the safe operators.

But that evening, it doesn't matter, as the Deepwater Horizon crew, recipients of a recent safety award, bypass all manner of established protocols downhole and cause a blowout that kills 11, and an epic oil spill that the domestic offshore drilling industry will take years to recover from.

3. Ongoing.  A major provider of worldwide offshore helicopter services hosts an expanding safety department that issues frequent safety alerts on such imperative workplace dangers as:

a. People walking into trailer hitches in the parking lot at company headquarters.
b. People walking into filing cabinets at company headquarters.
c. People injuring themselves standing up from chairs at company headquarters.

4. Have you taken a state approved Defensive Driving Course lately?  Enough said.

It is a given that people will often brush safety concerns aside in favor of getting the job done, absent any controls.  It is also a given that safety programs are often born out of industrial accidents, that the rules are written in blood, and that THE PROGRAM IS PUT IN PLACE LARGELY TO COVER MANAGEMENT'S REAR END AFTER AN ACCIDENT.  Later, the overly restrictive new programs are at least partially ignored on the line, and the process repeats itself, sometimes at the cost of many lives.

So what exactly can be done?  How can a safety program be engineered so that it actually makes a difference and a meaningful connection between the program and the employees?  A few ideas from the field:

1. The safety department must be trusted and respected both up and down.  Safety must report directly to top management so as to minimize political interference, and personnel on the line must be able to bring their concerns to the safety department where they will be given a fair hearing, without fear of retribution.  The moment that the line perceives that the safety department is blowing off their concerns, or worse, is a hit man for management, the safety department will have forever lost the cooperation of the line.  Moreover, if the line is engaged in operating, maintaining, and fueling aircraft in harsh conditions worldwide and your safety department is primarily focused on office hazards... your safety program has become a JOKE.

2. The safety department needs to be out in the field.  Often the best thing that safety personnel can do is push back from the desk and get out in the field to beat the bushes for potential problems.  Not with a checklist and a charter to document the sins of the field, but to talk to people and to understand that they alone do not understand the whole picture.  They might be surprised to find out that they can learn more in one afternoon of walking around than they would on several out of state safety conferences where they hobnob with equally clueless safety program managers from across the industry.

3. Standards must be enforced.  Much as I hate to admit it, the proliferation of exceedance monitoring and tracking equipment in the industry has had a dramatic effect on standardization.  What that means is that if you have a little box in the aircraft that is tracking everything you are doing, and management can see what you are doing any any given time... guess what?  People will behave better.  They won't like the intrusiveness, but they will behave better, because they really won't have a choice.  What management ultimately does with this data is a whole nuther topic, and one that will set the tone for the acceptance of the program, grudging or otherwise.

Ideally, if the line and safety work well together, the majority of threats will be identified and managed.  There will always be unsafe people, unsafe acts, and stupid policies, and they will all have to be dealt with.  But no one at any level should ever confuse a safety PROGRAM with a SAFE program.

One day in JROTC class

Iran... another country that allows hijabs in uniform

Instructor: Today, young JROTC cadets, we will be discussing Army Regulation 670-1, Wear and Appearance of Army Uniforms and Insignia.  As stated in paragraph 1-1, this regulation "prescribes the authorization for wear, composition, and classification of uniforms, and the occasions for wearing all personal (clothing bag issue), optional, and commonly worn organizational Army uniforms. It also prescribes the awards, insignia, and accouterments authorized for wear on the uniform, and how these items are worn."  

It is important to keep in mind that according to paragraph 1-7, "The Army is a uniformed service where discipline is judged, in part, by the manner in which a soldier wears a prescribed uniform, as well as by the individual’s personal appearance."

Furthermore, we will discuss important items such as a recent change to the regulation by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta authorizing wear of hijabs in formation...

Cadet Jones: Huh?

Instructor: Did you have something for the class, Cadet Jones?

Cadet Jones: I'm reading a little further down in paragraph 1-7, where it says "Personnel will not wear religious headgear in place of military headgear when military headgear is required (outdoors, or indoors when required for duties or ceremonies)."  What part of 670-1 has been repealed exactly?  Are we upholding uniform standards or not?

Instructor: Cadet Jones, there are also regulations regarding insubordination if you'd like me to bring you up to speed on them.  What exactly do you not understand about the regulation?

Cadet Jones: Well... could I wear a visible cross on my uniform?

Instructor: No!  From paragraph 1-7b(1)(a) clearly states "a religious item worn on a chain may not be visible when worn with the utility, service, dress, or mess uniforms".

Cadet Jones: Do I have the option of wearing no headgear in formation?

Instructor: Of course not.  Read down to paragraph 1-10, where the regulation specifies that "soldiers will wear headgear with the Army uniform, except under the following circumstances" and then goes on to list the specific circumstances, such as when you are in a vehicle or indoors.  But in a formation, you are expected to be in uniform.

Cadet Jones: A parade to me sounds like a formation where a uniform appearance is the standard... didn't this whole thing get started when CAIR wrote Panetta to complain that a Muslim student was not allowed to wear a hijab in a parade because her commander actually ENFORCED AR 670-1 as written?  I mean, I can't carry an umbrella with my uniform but since CAIR made some noise the whole uniform policy changes for a kid who wants to wear a hijab under the guise of religious freedom?

Instructor: You are too hung up on the letter of the law.  Other things are much more important than regulations and standards in today's Army.  Like diversity!  After all, the Chief of Staff GEN Casey said right after the Fort Hood shootings "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here".  

Cadet Jones: Sir, I'm only 15, but why is the Army tripping over itself trying to accommodate the religious preferences of the same group who kill us for religious reasons?  This is diversity for its own sake and its insane!! You are allegedly teaching us to become leaders... and from the first introduction to the military you are sending junior leaders the message that you can change long standing regulations at the whim of agitators and victim organizations outside the military!!!

Instructor: Cadet, I caution you against insubordination once more...

Cadet Jones: I can't believe how f___ed up the priorities are, and from the highest levels in the military!!!  I thought the military was about discipline and regulations, and people have to rise to the standard!!! Je__s Ch__t this is gay...

Instructor: WHAT did you say?

Cadet Jones: Oh, the profanity?  I'm sorry, sir, I got a little carried away...

Instructor: NO, not THAT...

Cadet Jones: Oh, the Lord's name in vain... my bad.

Instructor: NO!!!! You made a slur against gays!!! Sergeant!! Call security!!!

fade to black....

Ode to a full timer

Attention to orders:

The Active Guard and Reserve Medal of Honor is presented to MAJ Smedlap.

For exceptionally meritorious service on Saturday afternoon at drill.

Saturday afternoon, clipboard in hand, MAJ Smedlap was conducting an inspection of a hand grenade class in the armory, when without warning, a live grenade landed at his feet.

Without a moment's hesitation and with complete disregard for the safety of others, MAJ Smedlap threw the closest m day soldier, PFC Snuffy, on top of the grenade and exited the area in a rapid fashion so as not to mess up his uniform.

Following the explosion and only after verifying the coast was clear and no further grenades would land at his feet, MAJ Smedlap organized a detail of m day soldiers to clean up the armory and tend to the survivors.  His rapid actions resulted in a minimum of effort required of anyone on full time status having to spend any part of their four day work week cleaning up m dayer's messes.

MAJ Smedlap's actions resulted in an additional full time PFC slot becoming available in the unit, as well as the preservation of the integrity of the command structure of the unit, the continuity of everyone's full time jobs, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, his retirement package.

MAJ Smedlap's actions are in keeping with the greatest traditions of the cool guys in full time jobs, the active guard and reserve system, and the US Army.

Small hooah.

Old procurement joke...

A good plan with funding is a DREAM.  


A good plan without funding is a HALLUCINATION.  


Funding without a good plan is a NIGHTMARE.  

On military procurement...

V-22 Osprey

Recently I have been listening to the audio book “The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey”.  It’s an exhaustive history of the V-22 tilt-rotor program over the decades, and it got me thinking about my own time working procurements in the Army. 

Procurement in the DoD is a nasty business.  To illustrate, let us use a theoretical example of a “joint” project, meant to save the DoD money by fielding one common system to all branches; Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. 

First, someone at the Pentagon briefs a long PowerPoint show on the money spent on cutlery in DoD dining facilities, and how things can be done better and cheaper if we can all just agree on a common solution which will take us through the next four decades.  Some four star agrees, funding is slipped into a bill in congress under the radar, and the Joint Spork Office is formed and staffed at some installation, somewhere. 

Theoretical "Joint Spork"

The services all go on a long TDY somewhere, to whatever location has better hotels, to have a week’s worth of day-long meetings to determine their requirements for the new spork.  The Marines are angry that they don’t get to go because the Navy gets to represent their interests at the meeting. 

The Army wants the spork to be capable of digging a fighting position, and the field artillerymen want to be able to quickly convert it for use as a flechette in case a dining facility is overrun. 

The Navy needs a marinized version in order to use the spork while underway at sea, and to shoot it out of torpedo tubes. 

The Air Force needs it to be able to survive an ejection at 60,000 feet, and be able to cut through an aircraft fuselage for airfield rescue. 

The Marines really need the spork to have a bayonet lug, so that they might attach it to their rifles when the battle is going very badly. 

After spending all week dining out but not agreeing on much of anything, the services retire to their respective installations, fire off lots of emails, and control of the project disappears deep into their separate bureaucracies, each with wildly different priorities and processes.  Months go by between meetings, years go by before the project gets any traction.  Somehow, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines make do with legacy edition cutlery, although some cut themselves and nearly starve due to the inherent inadequacies of the low-tech fork, knife, and spoon. 

Other DoD-level bureaucracies lobby to test the new spork, shooting it, electrifying it, blowing it up, or whatever they need to do to justify the existence of their individual testing organizations, which forces unforeseen design changes and cost overruns.  More years drag by.  The spork design becomes heavier and more costly, and hardly fit to eat with. 

By and by, the Air Force goes out on their own and procures their own spork, in defiance of DoD policy and federal law, but at least they are the first to field a spork, while the joint spork languishes in the two year long operational testing phase. 

Eight years later, the joint spork is ready for production, meeting 80% of the specified requirements, and costing in the neighborhood of $150 per unit.  Meanwhile, mil-spec copies can be found on eBay for $12.  While this is meant to be a humorous example, this is exactly how we get to the legendary $600 toilet seat of DoD procurement lore. 

There are other reasons for cost overruns besides “jointness”.  Let us examine a few of them. 

Particularly in the case of high-tech and leap-ahead technologies like the V-22 (read: technologies that have not been designed yet), it is impossible to know at the outset of the project how much per airplane you are going to pay.  Aircraft invariably gain weight and lose capabilities during development as the project transitions from fanciful requirements and marketing promises to what is actually achievable in reality with a fixed budget. 

By the time it is apparent that an aircraft will not meet both its target costs nor its performance goals, enough time and money has been invested (and the contract cancellation costs are so high) that it is not financially feasible to bail out of the project.  This brings to mind the DoD truism that there are two phases of any procurement project… too early to tell, and too late to stop. 

Another procurement truism simply states: good, fast, cheap… pick two. 

If you want high quality, you can have it fast, or cheap… but not both. 

If you want it fast, you can have quality, or low cost… but not both. 

And if you want it cheap, you can do it right, or it’ll take much longer. 

Not to say that any of this is correct, but it IS the way that the DoD does business! 

Lastly, the requirements, budgets, and “want lists” of the services constantly change with the political winds, competing priorities for limited defense dollars, etc. etc.  This is where you sometimes feel sorry for the contractors.  Originally told that they will be building 2000 aircraft for three branches of service, two services will drop the aircraft completely over the decades-long development cycle, the sole remaining service will change the amount that they want to buy six times, money will too tight to fund all of the original requirements, and other requirements will be worked around and dropped at the behest of the service in order to stay somewhat on budget. 

When the final bills come in and only 400 aircraft are ordered of the original 2000, every newspaper on the beltway will report how badly the project is over budget and what a piece of junk the aircraft is, and the specter of the “military industrial complex” will ride again, for a short time. 

As ugly as the process is, it is ultimately important that we suffer through this charade and fund leap-ahead technologies to maintain our military’s technological overmatch against potential enemies, because we always roll into battle with what’s on the shelf, and not what we really need.  An example from Iraq:

During the initial invasion, I know soldiers who spent seventeen months in Sadr City, working out of light HMMWV vehicles, with NO armor, and only fabric doors.  This is unforgivable in 2003, as the light armor of the HMMWV vehicles had proven to be inadequate for combat in Somalia in 1993 and even in Bosnia in the late 1990s against the land mine threat… with nobody shooting.

HMMWV without armor

By the time I arrived there for the first time in 2005 with a ground unit, IEDs were taking a heavy toll on American troops, and there was a major push to armor ALL Army ground vehicles, first with torch cut plate steel doors, and later with bolt-on armor kits.  Casualties continued to mount from IEDs, as bombs can be built faster than armored vehicles can be designed and fielded.

HMMWV with armor kit

Beginning in 2007, the MRAP family of mine-resistant vehicles began to replace armored HMMWVs, and after six years and thousands of US casualties, the US Armed Forces had a solution that was NEARLY adequate to meet the threat on the ground. 

MRAP

Why did the US not have MRAPs earlier?  They WERE in Iraq, at least since 2005.  Not with the US, but in the service of some foreign armies.  Since the first MRAP designs were of South African manufacture, and symbolic of the apartheid era in that region, most Western armies wanted nothing to do with them and would not purchase them from South Africa, regardless of operational necessity. 

And those kind of decisions, along with unbridled spending cuts, get troops KILLED.  

Buffalo MRAP in Iraq, circa 2005

Taking care of the troops

ex·pert

[n., v. ek-spurt; adj. ek-spurt, ik-spurt]

noun

1. a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority: a language expert.

First of all, a few basic assumptions to set the stage for this rant...

- To members of the military, WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN and WHAT YOU HAVE DONE while in the military is essential to establishing your credibility, and everything else is pretty much subordinate to this. It’s just the way they think.

- The Department of Defense is an intractable bureaucracy that wastes immense sums of taxpayer money on a daily basis without batting an eye. It is difficult to comprehend how high, wide, and deep is the fraud, waste, and abuse within the DoD. Moreover, the DoD hasn’t the slightest interest in addressing the problem or fixing it.

- The DoD is going to need to cut lots of money out of the budget very soon whether they like it or not.

- The military COULD stand to think outside the institutional box when making the aforementioned cuts.

- It MAY not send the right message to an all-volunteer force to propose deep cuts to their benefit packages in the midst of three wars.

With this in mind, it was with much distress that I read about the Defense Business Board’s plan to overhaul the military retirement system, essentially replacing the twenty year retirement with a tiered 401K type plan, and thereby saving the DoD untold sums of money… all by reneging on the cornerstone of the military benefit package, a proposed move that is sure to have a unbelievable impact on retention.

If you were to ask “have any of the knuckleheads on this board ever served in the military?” you might be on to something. The board roster reads like a who’s who list of noted academics and businesspeople without even a tangential connection to anything military, save for a handful of DoD civilians and a few who have, like the current Secretary of Defense, spent much longer in undergrad programs than in uniform.

In fact, among the 21 board members (bios are provided for 19) FIVE have served in the military. One is a retired USMC Major General, a nice start, but the remaining four have A COMBINED TOTAL OF 19 YEARS OF MILITARY EXPERIENCE, not all of it on active duty. TWO of the five have combat experience. None of them hold Chair or Vice-Chair positions. And these are the people charged with revamping the military retirement system, not one of them having a stake in the outcome.

So I ask you, would you appoint a commission of noted pastry chefs to determine how much doctors should be allowed to bill? How about a panel of rocket scientists to negotiate union benefits for plumbers?

Only if you had no earthly idea of what you were doing when you appointed the commission…

Army MEDEVAC story

Somewhere on a dust swept flightline across the globe, a military MEDEVAC helicopter crew is having a day like this... (reprinted from May 2009)


The door to the first up ready room swung open and our platoon leader stuck his head inside. 

Surfing the internet and watching DVDs on our laptops, seven and a half hours into our duty day, we barely noticed.

“You guys might have a nine-line coming in, not sure if its urgent or priority”. 

Mentally snapping out of our “crew rest profile” that we maintain for a 24 hours at a time on 1^st up, we were thankful for the warning.   Most of the eight crew members for our two first up UH-60s hustled to the operations office, fifty yards away.  There had been false alarms before.  Sometimes missions are canceled before we can get the engines started.  Sometimes missions that we think belong to us actually are closer to another MEDEVAC company.  Sometimes the location changes.  Sometimes what appears to be an urgent mission ends up being a routine transfer request and we get all wound up for nothing.  Sometimes the missions are bogus. 

But sometimes minutes count, and American GIs, or Iraqi Army troops, or Iraqi civilians, or even enemy insurgents are in pain, bleeding, and dying as the clock ticks. 

That is what we are here for. 

And when the call for MEDEVAC goes out, we go NOW.  The battle captains and operations officers and staff toads can all take their time sorting out what we should have done, if we could have gone quicker, and why didn’t we notify them sooner.  We will be back long before the finger pointing has begun in earnest. 

But in the meantime we need to move hurt people.  And we don’t in any circumstance want hurt people waiting on us.  No GIs are going to die on our watch if we can do anything about it.  It’s not heroism, its not self-aggrandizing propaganda, its just what we do. 

What we do now is stare across the desk at the operations specialist on the phone.  He’s getting something off the computer.  There is probably some paperwork he already started on the counter.  Wait, did he write down the location already?  Do we know how many patients yet?  He hasn’t pointed any fingers our way or called “MEDEVAC” across the radio yet.  Are we wasting our time?  Another phone rings.  The operations specialist is still on the other phone.  A senior medic answers it. 

Tick.  Tick.  Tick. 

The senior medic answers the second phone and confirms that it is an urgent mission.  But operations still has not sent the call out for MEDEVAC.  He probably doesn’t have all the information needed to launch us yet.  Where did the pilot in command go?  We should have everybody from our crew close by… Everybody should be in radio range… I key the radio…

“1^st up lead PC, are you up?”

Tick.  Tick.  Tick.  Too late.  The operations specialist keys his radio. 

“MEDEVAC, MEDEVAC, MEDEVAC”. 

 It is a familiar refrain, one that begins every urgent mission.  The scary ones, the boring ones, the ones where we wake up at 2AM and are in the aircraft before our brains boot up, and the ones where the flight medics are fully engaged with critical patients in the back of the aircraft, telling us to speed up cause time matters.  We joke around a lot, but we rarely joke using the word MEDEVAC because the mere mention of the word raises the blood pressure of any crewmember on duty.  And anytime the radio breaks squelch in the middle of the night, we stop breathing. 

But now the Standard Operating Procedure kicks in.  The Pilot in Command and the medic will get as much information as they can in operations, to include weather and intelligence updates, while the crew chief and myself will get the aircraft ready to go.  Whether the mission will be a big deal or a big waste of time and jet fuel is not our problem.  We go now… 

“Go!” 

We hope nobody is on the other side of the door as we blow through it.  Amazing track and field feats have been witnessed between operations and the aircraft during nine-lines.  Bicycles and boxes hurdled, old and fat National Guard crewmembers setting 50 and 100 yard dash records, very entertaining. 

This will be a quick launch, its mid afternoon, most if not all of us are awake and close by, and we can see.  Night launches are the same, except for the seeing part.  Ever tried to fasten a car seatbelt in the dark?  Over body armor?  Full of adrenaline?  Not recommended. 

After the short run to the aircraft, we begin dressing in our aviation combat gear, throwing our body armor vests over our heads first, taking care not to smash ourselves in the face with the ten pound armor plates.  Over that goes the survival vests, with radios, ammunition, medical equipment, and whatever accessories we strapped to it months ago when we were in training.  Gloves, earplugs, watches, kneeboards, and so forth are laid out in the aircraft where we left them.  Or not.  I notice for the first time that I am still holding the magazine I was reading in the ready room.  Into the door pouch it goes.  Into the seat I go. 

As I strap into my seat, a lieutenant rides by on a bicycle, stopping to ask the crew chief a question about whether the aircraft is hoist capable.  No doubt for some bean counting administrative tasking from headquarters.  We don’t have the time to stare blankly or laugh. 

“Clear!”  I scream. 

We are almost wearing earplugs and helmets by this time and are not up on intercom, and screaming does the trick for crew communications and sometimes wakes up people who are wandering about the flightline in a daze.  Plus it sounds kinda cool. 

“Clear” the crew chief screams back.  Meaning there is nobody on the left side of the aircraft.  By the APU exhaust.  Which will soon be quite warm and loud beneath the nozzle. 

I flip the switch that starts the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) starting sequence.  It’s the loud jet engine noise you hear on airliners sitting at the gate, and on larger helicopters that don’t have their blades turning.  The APU runs the electrical systems that would otherwise be powered by the aircraft engines, and provides the compressed air source to start the engines themselves. 

The APU is lit and howling as the medic runs up to the aircraft, medical bag and rifle in hand, and begins the same dressing sequence.  We’ll have to scream more with the APU noise.  I am flipping switches and turning on radios in sequence with the checklist.  The pilot in command is still in operations, getting updates and figuring a course to the destination that will keep us clear of any friendly operations and airspace.  We’d hate to fly through anybody’s firefight or air strike on the way to pick up hurt people, which happens occasionally.  Mostly to those who don’t get updates. 

“Where we going?”  I scream, now to the medic. 

“Warhorse!” he answers.  Great.  Forward Operating Base Warhorse, near Baqubah, former hangout of former Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, prior to the USAF delivering him a pair of 500 lb bombs one evening in 2006.  If you want to get blown up or shot at, Warhorse and the residents of Baqubah will hook you right up. 

I punch up the navigation system preset for Warhorse so that the destination will be loaded when we take off.  The pilot in command arrives, with sticky note updates, and begins dressing.  75 meters away, an identical crew dance is happening in our chase aircraft, as we are a flight of two.  The more, the merrier. 

Tick.  Tick.  Tick. 

I am up to the point where I can start the aircraft engines, but standard operating procedure is to wait for confirmation from the pilot in command.  I gesture a request to start and he nods.  Clear one.  The crew chief verifies we are clear. 

The GE turboshaft engine, with its near 2,000 horsepower comes to life with its characteristic low moan.  The blades begin to turn.  The second the #1 engine starter switches off, I am asking the crew chief to clear the #2 engine.  In a minute both engines are started and the aircraft systems are beginning to stabilize.  I can see that our chase aircraft’s blades are turning and they will not be far behind us in the start sequence.   The remaining aircraft systems boot up, the aircraft is configured for flight, and final takeoff checks are completed.  When our chase aircraft is ready to go, they transmit the code word over the radio.  We acknowledge and are already calling tower as we pull power and are light on the wheels.  The pilot in command (PC) makes the radio call. 

“Tower, Alamo 10, flight of two UH-60s, request immediate departure alpha bravo, urgent MEDEVAC”. 

“Alamo 10, cleared for immediate departure, report bravo” is the tower’s reply. 

In the combat environment, locations and directions of departure and arrival are encoded so as to be indecipherable to anyone monitoring the radio who does not have a current airfield diagram.  No sense in making it easy on the bad guys to figure out where we are going. 

Picking up to a high hover, I nose the aircraft over and accelerate over the compound, over housing units, countless military vehicles and warehouses, and between Saddam-era aircraft shelters now filled with US air force planes and support equipment.  Our chase aircraft falls in behind us and we cross the fence into greater Iraq, approaching maximum level speed. 

Eight minutes from notification, Alamo flight is airborne and enroute.  Not bad. 

We avoid over flight of buildings and flocks as best we can.  At this altitude and speed, we can just barely make out the Iraqi people in their red and black robes as they go about their business in the fields and small villages surrounding the base.  From the air, it seems peaceful below.  We wonder what the Iraqis think of us as we blow over their houses, day and night, on our way to lifesaving missions.  Probably nothing good.  One of our pilots has remarked that they probably don’t know that they are shooting at Iraqi patients half the time when they start shooting at our aircraft.  Today, we don’t notice if anyone shoots at us.  Our plan is to be half a mile away by the time they can aim their weapons at us. 

“Did you see THAT?” says the PIC.

Few of us did, but a few miles away, very near where we plan to be flying, a thick column of black smoke rises from a burning vehicle along a small road.  The PIC just saw the vehicle explode.  We consider reporting what we have seen to headquarters, until we look closer and see two AH-64 Apache helicopters already circling the scene. 

For now we choose to avoid the site by several miles.  We would find out many hours later that this burning vehicle is where our casualties had come from, and the unit had back hauled the casualties to Warhorse instead of calling us directly to the scene. 

Soon the fire is behind us, and we are looking ahead on the map and out the window for a clear approach to the base.  A fairly large city is in our path, but working our way in from the north we can avoid most of the built up areas and not shake too many roofs.  A few minutes out, the PIC is already talking to the base tower on one radio, and the medic has contacted the medics on the ground.  We are less than a mile out now, on a close in downwind approach which keeps us clear of the base and clear of the built up areas off base, oh yeah, and a big antenna right in the middle.  I radio the chase aircraft to give us lots of space for the base turn. 

Abeam the landing point just below cruise speed, I bank hard, bleeding off airspeed rapidly and keeping the turn in tight.   Properly executed, this will give us minimum exposure time to bad guys near the base, while we line up on final approach at a speed that won’t have us pulling gobs of power in at the bottom to stop.  Coming in fast is great if you can get stopped in time…

We do all right, and both aircraft are soon lined up on a decelerating final approach.  This pad is hard enough to see in daylight, and near impossible at night when the pad is lost in the dark spots between blinding lights elsewhere on the base.  In seconds we are calling “landing” to the tower and touching down on the helipads surrounded by protective barriers, where a HMMWV ambulance waits just outside the walls.  As soon as the parking brake is set and the flight controls are centered, the flight medics and crew chiefs of both aircraft are scrambling out their windows to get to the ambulance. 

There is still some confusion as to how many patients we have.  Possibly as many as four.  While our medics sort it out at the ambulance with the ground medics, the crew chiefs provide crowd control under the rotor disk, and over the radio, both aircrews discuss contingencies for different numbers of patients.  In the case of one critical patient, sometimes both medics will go on one aircraft with the patient, but today it looks like we’ll have plenty of patients to keep both medics busy in their respective aircraft. 

The final vote is two, one for each aircraft.  The infantrymen have taken shrapnel and have some burns, but look to be OK.  Stripped down to an army blanket and oxygen mask, our patient gives us a thumbs-up as he is loaded into the litter pan in back.  A good sign. 

A quick before takeoff check and we are airborne again and soon over the fence and speeding back to the hospital with the two wounded.  The burning vehicle that we saw earlier appears to have gone out.  We avoid the area anyway.  Everyone is happy that these two wounded are stable and will make it to the hospital for the handoff to level three care. 

Halfway back, the medics transmit patient information to the emergency room, and within minutes we are touching down at the hospital pad, two aircraft in trail.  Seconds later, the medics and crew chiefs jump out of the aircraft and are met by several members of the hospital staff and litter team, who wheel the patients through the flag draped entrance to the hospital.  Inside the medics will confer with the receiving medical personnel and hand off with impressive speed.  Two more satisfied customers. 

Our medics return with new litters, and we make the short flight to our unit, where oxygen tanks and medical supplies are restocked, and the aircraft given a final walk around in case we need to launch again soon.  Engines are shut down, the blades stop, and now the paperwork and after action review process begins for the next half hour or so. 

We’re not quite sure what the night will hold next, but we are ready.  So we go to dinner.  It’s chicken again. 

ALAMO DUSTOFF.  

Thoughts upon military retirement

After completing nine years of active duty and finishing up with eleven years of part-time guard status, it is finally time to hang up the uniform.  


It has been a wild ride, with five deployments to the Middle East and Bosnia and an overseas tour in Korea, which is nothing compared to the deployment schedules of today's active duty troops.


I worked with some great people at times, I learned most of what I know about working with others, and I learned to fly helicopters first in the Army.  I have served alongside many different people who had come together to accomplish something bigger than themselves, and have known quite a few that have lost their lives in defense of our country.  Regardless of the politics or the situations they find themselves in, the all-volunteer troops who serve today perform their duties honorably and faithfully, as I hope and pray they will always do for the good of our country.  


Finally, I was blessed to meet my wife while I was on active duty at Fort Hood, and I owe her much for her love and patience during all my extended time away, which was never easy nor pleasant to deal with.  


So to sum up my military experience, I would like to share "four things that it took me twenty years to learn in the military".  See if any of these apply to your own organization, wherever you work...  


1. If your boss doesn't care, you can get away with pretty much anything.  


2. Formal military schooling, with all its pettiness and artificial stressors, is actually excellent preparation for the real world.  If only to demonstrate that people who don't care and don't do anything in training will not care nor do anything even when lives are at stake.  If you think your screwed up organization will put aside their differences and pull together when it really counts, you are as clueless as I was when I first got on the plane.  


3. The full-time Army National Guard represent the absolute worst of both the DoD Civilian work force and the military, and are richly deserving of the bad reputation that they have earned among active duty types.  


4. When in doubt, go Air Force.  


But I'm not bitter about it... :o