Check out THIS letter in my right-wing paper-feel free to reply

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.thedailylight.com/articles/2008/01/30/opinion/doc47a0da69a5abb103471540.txt
To the Editor,

At the beginning of the Iraqi war, a fighter pilotknown affectionately by fellow troops as “Chocks” was shot down in his Warthog A-10 attack jet over Baghdad. The young serviceman was lucky: Two U.S. search and rescue helicopters soon appeared, dropped their courageous crew and extracted him under heavy enemy fire.

But just like the exasperating inability of Washington to provide the armed services with sufficient body armor and state of the art armored vehicles, search and rescue missions are about to fall victim to the latest Beltway squabble — an intramural fight by disgruntled military contractors that could leave military members wounded on the battle field without any lifeline. And politicians wonder why voters are clamoring for change.

Due to logging hundreds of such life-saving missions as part of operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq, our current fleet of search and rescue choppers is wearing down and out. A senior Air Force official recently noted that the fleet of Pave Hawk rescue helicopters now serving in Iraq has a diminished success rate and faces a “severe problem,” pointing out that we simply don’t have enough choppers to do the job.

Seeking to avoid another political controversy, the Department of Defense has scrambled to augment the aging fleet with next-generation replacements.

The Air Force awarded the contract to Boeing — widely seen in the industry and the military as possessing the most sophisticated rescue helicopter with the highest top speed, longest range, largest carrying capacity, and the best capabilities at the lowest risk.

But the delivery of these much needed aerial lifelines to the troops is in doubt now because the two jilted competitors who lost the contract have figured out how to tie it up in knots. In a tawdry game of brinksmanship with the U.S. Air Force, the two competitors — aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky — realized that a protest could so delay the critical project that a frustrated Department of Defense might relent and give them a share of the project.

For the most part, the competitors’ legal action was roundly and summarily dismissed by the independent arbiter — the Government Accountability Office (GAO) — except for one technicality relating to what many experts regard as a minor cost factor in the contract award.

But the two losing competitors knew that the arcane rules of the GAO process were on their side, and that they could get the much sought after litigation bottleneck if they could sustain even a single complaint about the winning contract, however insignificant. By forcing the GAO to concede a small error relating to how certain components of Boeing’s winning rescue helicopter would be accounted for over the entire “life-cycle” of the project, Lockheed and Sikorsky were able to essentially block new search and rescue helicopters from reaching the troops.

To be sure, the GAO is not to blame. Old procurement laws, written at a time when defense acquisitions were simpler, require this kind of throwing the baby out with bathwater on a technicality. But those laws never anticipated that our military members could be left in the cold in the middle of a war. Right now, our troops are making the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of people across the world and for the security of our homeland. The least we can do is provide enough weapons, body armor, vehicles and the search and rescue aircraft to ensure they are able to complete their missions and return safely to their families.

Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne noted that this bureaucratic layover “may be where all of procurement is going: a protest, some findings, some resolution and then onward.” However, if that resolution never arrives, neither will aircraft, tanks, body armor, nor a whole host of essential military supplies upon which our fighting men and women depend. For the sake of our troops, Congress should move this contract and other stalled contracts forward with appropriate speed and should provide a stern warning to mendacious corporate defense contractors that they should never exploit legal loopholes at the expense of troop safety. It wouldn’t hurt defense contractors to recall the rescuer motto: “These things do that others may live.”

CW4 (Ret)Richard Krell

Bushland, Texas

EMS Pilot-in-Command

[sinkingfeeling]

1. I think 'Bushland, Texas' says it all. How many rescue helicopters would they need if we weren't in

Iraq? Do we have any said helicopters sitting, unused, on any of the 800 bases we have?

[w8liftinglady]

2. I pointed out that

Lynne Cheney sat on the board of Lockheed, and Myers,former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff 2001-2005,sits on the board of united techologies-who owns sikorsky.I'm glad more military are speaking out.

[Lex1775]

3. No, we don't.

I spent time in the service in USAF CSAR, and we don't have rescue helicopters sitting around, unused. They are highly specialized vehicles that have a lot more bells and whistles on them compared to similar helicopters. The USAF has been looking for a replacement CSAR helo for years.