By Emelie Rutherford
The Marine Corps’ top officer said he is “very proud” of how the V-22 Osprey has performed in Iraq and wants the service to consider multiple uses of the tilt-rotor aircraft that is likely to be sent to Afghanistan.
Commandant Gen. James Conway told reporters last Friday that for the previously troubled V-22 program “our biggest challenge right now is to stop thinking, as a Marine Corps, about the Osprey as a helicopter.”
“It’s not just a helicopter,” Conway said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. “So we’ve challenged our people in Iraq: ‘Think about new and different uses of an airplane that can be that fast and that effective, and let’s go the next horizon here.'”
Conway called the Osprey “the aircraft of our times,” noting it can “cruise at two-and-a-half times the speed of our current helicopters, cruises at 13,000 feet, gets into and out of the zone like a rocket ship.”
The first V-22 squadron deployed to the Iraq war in late 2007. The Marine Corps is the lead service developing the Bell Helicopter Textron [TXT]- Boeing [BA] aircraft also being built for the Air Force, Navy, and Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
The Marine Corps’ current program calls for putting the fourth deployed Osprey squadron on a ship, Conway said. And if his plans to redeploy up to 20,000 Marines from Iraq to the conflict in Afghanistan before the end of the year materialize, he said, at least one V-22 squadron will hit the Afghan airways (Defense Daily, Jan. 26).
“We’re going to learn some things when it goes aboard ships, just like we learned some things about its viability in the desert,” Conway said.
While the V-22 was tested at length in the U.S. desert, he said once the aircraft arrived in Iraq a slip ring wore out at a faster rate than anticipated because of differences with “the Iraqi dust and dirt and things that we found in the environment there.”
“So I suspect just like that, when we get it into a salt-sea kind of environment we’re going to learn some things about the maintenance and the requirements of the aircraft there as well,” Conway said.
The commandant said the V-22 is “made for a place like Afghanistan” because of its speed and quietness.
The Marine Corps and SOCOM are developing a belly gun for the Osprey before it is sent to Afghanistan, he said. That gun will allow the aircraft to fly alone without being accompanied by other firepower-providing aircraft.
“There’s continual product enhancement over what is already a very effective airplane,” Conway said.
He said the tilt-rotor aircraft can replace some CH-46 helicopters in Afghanistan, where the older choppers “really started to come up against their match” because of elevated terrain and high temperatures.
When visiting Afghanistan last August, Conway said, he saw single CH-46s carrying just five or six combat-loaded Marines.
“It’s high time that we bring aboard the Osprey,” he said.
Asked if the V-22 could be used off an amphibious ship in a counter-piracy mission around the horn of Africa, Conway said the service has received no taskings to do that. Yet he said the Osprey “would be a wonderful platform” for efforts to rout pirates out of camps.
“You don’t hear the V-22 coming nearly like you do a conventional helicopter,” he said. “It can fly higher, it can fly deeper, it can fly faster. So the speed and the shock and the surprise of an attack on those camps would be very much facilitated” by the Osprey.