Slashdot Mirror
US Army Scraps Comanche Helicopter
swordboy writes "The US Army just scrapped the Comanche helicopter program - a joint venture with Boeing and United Technologies. After 20 years and billions of taxpayer dollars, it never produced an operational helicopter. Open-source helicopter, anyone?" The article notes: "The Comanche is designed to receive and process intelligence from drones and surveillance aircraft and pass it to ground units. The Army was directed in 2002 to focus its research on producing a reconnaissance helicopter rather than one that can attack as well as scout. The helicopter was intended to counter Soviet weapons."
Neil Peart's New DrumKit
Bah. Old news. He was found last week.
All our 7imes have is wiped off and
bigger scale.
Stupidly large amounts of money for things which never actually work. Wasteful corporate welfare!
Etc. etc. etc.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
...Comanche helicopters cancel YOU!
In Soviet Russia, twenty billion dollar attack helicopter cancels YOU!
So after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we realize that drones are effective, useful and reliable. And cheap. So now that we have proof, we cancel the project. It would be more wasteful to cancel programs willy-nilly without a combat test of the alternatives.
That explains A LOT!
The whole WMD/Terrorist/Axis of Evil thing was invented to justify a field test of alternative technology. If Sadam hadn't been sitting around, we would have had to create him as a test platform to keep our weapon programs on track.
In any case, we need to make sure that we have a robust pipeline of petty dictators to keep the field tests on schedule. Otherwise the cost overruns will kill us.
God, I hope I'm being cynical.