Air Force Strategy on UH-1N: Wait and Hurry Up

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/03/air-force-strategy-on-uh-1n-wait-and-hurry-up/

Air Force Strategy on UH-1N: Wait and Hurry Up
By Richard Whittle on March 17, 2016 at 10:11 AM

What could justify the Air Force awarding a sole source contract for helicopters worth close to a billion – that’s a thousand millions – dollars? Pick an answer:
1. A classified joint service military exercise called Mighty Guardian in which some of the 62 aging UH-1N Huey helicopters failed their assignment to carry security forces to any of 400 widely spaced nuclear missile silos at bases in the northern plains if terrorists attack.
2. More than a decade of the Air Force meaning to replace those 62 Hueys but never quite getting around to it.
3. Six months of deliberation since Adm. Cecil Haney, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, sent “an urgent letter about the problem to the deputy secretary of defense and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” as our colleague John Donnelly of Roll Call put it in a February story revealing that internal alarm bell.
4. All of the above.

Whatever the answer, Air Force Secretary Deborah James and other officials confirmed in House Armed Services subcommittee hearings Thursday that the service’s acquisition arm is studying whether replacing 25 of those Hueys has become so urgent it warrants invoking the Economy Act to waive a competition and just go buy something.

“I think it’s urgent,” James assured Alabama Republican Mike Rogers, chairman of the HASC strategic forces subcommittee, who noted Haney’s concern over the issue and the dozen years that have passed since the Air Force recognized the problem. A decision, James told Rogers, is “a couple of weeks away.”

At a tactical air and land forces subcommittee hearing later, California Democrat Loretta Sanchez declared, as she has on similar issues: Not so fast. The fiscal 2017 budget request. she suggested, already contains a sensible, competitive approach to solving the problem without extreme measures.