[Pro Patria] Does the attacking helicopter give enough bang for the buck?

[Spino]

If attack helicopters didn't provide an adequate bang for the buck they would have been phased out decades ago. The concept of a mobile, highly maneuverable weapon platform that can operate unhindered by terrain and inclement weather and is able to eliminate virtually all enemy assets on the battlefield is awfully hard to factor out of the equation.

The attack helicopter's biggest challenge for the next 100 years is to proving how much longer it can remain a viable platform in the face of remotely controlled or autonomous drones which are cheaper and by nature of their pilotless design, can operate for much longer periods of time and do not put their human operators at risk.

The cancellation of the Commanche program is a pretty good sign of things to come. That bird was in development for an awfully long time and seemed like a perfect fit for a state of the art 21st century army; stealthy, fast, quiet and well armed. The cancellation of the Commanche program made it painfully obvious the US military believes drones are the future of reconaissance and light support work.

The Achilles heel to drones (especially the current generation) is that there is always the chance that the remotely piloted ones can be rendered ineffective through jamming or through the elimination of the satellites that link them it their controllers. Autonomous drones are another story but the idea of letting them operate completely independent once cut off from their operators is a bit worrisome. AI programming is a tricky business. Despite the costs involved it is much easier to design a human operated system and train humans to operate it than it is to create a fully autonomous system that can do the same job and deal with the same myriad of situations. Not that it can't be done but AI R&D requires a ton of time, development and testing.

As to the elimination of dedicated attack helicopters that would be extremely foolish as it is based on the assumption that there will never be another conventional conflict which would require such an asset. Every conflict the US has fought since the Vietnam War has proven the worth of attack helicopters; they clearly perform just as well in low intensity conflicts as they do in 'high' intensity, conventional ones.