Army Hates To Take Guard Apaches, But It ‘Must Happen’: UnderSec Carson

WASHINGTON: This hurts us more than it hurts you. That’s the essence of the regular Army’s message to the National Guard about the Aviation Restructure Initiative (ARI), a controversial cost-cutting plan that — among other things – strips the Guard of all its AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. Pain is on its way for all of us, leader after leader told me, and ARI is the least worst way to allocate it. But can they convince a skeptical Congress?

“I think ARI will happen. I think indeed it must happen,” Army Under Secretary Brad Carson told me in an exclusive interview. (We’ll have more from this wide-ranging interview later). Just the day before, he had joined a delegation led by Defense Under Secretary Robert Work to meet with a committee of the Council of Governors. (Defense Sec. Hagel himself took time from a trip to Fort Rucker, the home of Army aviation, to dial in). “That’s one of the points I made yesterday: All of these cuts are not ones that the Army wanted,” said Carson. “One of the governors asked me where we stood on these issues, and I said, ‘we fight them. We don’t like the cuts, but Congress has visited these things upon the Army and upon the entire Department of Defense.’”

Counting the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, Carson said, DoD will have to bear a trillion dollars in cuts by 2023, $400 billion of which falls on the Army. “Aviation modernization, aviation operations and sustainment, are extremely expensive,” Carson said, even at the best of times. Today, after 13 years of using existing helicopters hard while canceling or indefinitely delaying replacements like Comanche and the Armed Aerial Scout, “we have long deferred bills from periods of war,” he said, including “massive bills that are coming through in modernization for other aging aircraft that are going to crowd out Future Vertical Lift” — a proposed super-chopper for the 2030s — “not to mention harm readiness” in the nearer term.

Today, Army aviation readiness is “the highest we’ve ever seen since I’ve been in uniform,” said Gen. Dennis Via, the head of Army Materiel Command, at a breakfast with the Defense Writers’ Group this morning. “If we maintain all of those [current] platforms, we won’t be able to sustain the readiness rates we have today.”

So the Aviation Restructure Initiative would prune the current array of helicopters, retiring aging aircraft to avoid the costs of sustaining and modernizing them. Most dramatically, it eliminates the entire fleet of OH-58 Kiowa armed scout helicopters — active, Guard, and reserve — which if retained would require $10 billion for even a modest modernization. In fact, the reason the regulars are taking the Guard’s Apaches in the first place is to replace their Kiowas in the armed reconnaissance role.

“My hope is we can work with the governors constructively and the TAGs [the state Adjutants-General] and the states to have a resolution, to explain to them the dilemmas we face,” Carson told me. “I’m very hopeful…. I think in the end, people will recognize that these are not easy decisions, they are not even desirable ones from the Army’s perspective, but they are in the end the best decisions to balance the needs of the Department of Defense and the needs of the total force.”