Avionic And Fire Control Equipment Complement To Enhance Attack Helicopter Survivability

Weapons systems are assesed on the basis of their military value, frequently defined as cost effectiveness. A cost effective weapons system is one that can achieve a military objective with minimum expenditure of available resources such as ordnance or losses of own equipment. The attack helicopter can be subjected to assessment of its military value or cost effectiveness. This assessment fortunately is not too sophisticated since its primary antiarmor mission has been defined rather narrowly, thus permitting use of simple scenarios in tradeoff analyses. The cost effectiveness of the attack helicopter, for the purposes of this paper, is given in terms of armored vehicles destroyed for each aircraft lost to hostile antiaircraft fire. The helicopter loss rate thus determines the cost effectiveness, and in turn is a strong function of exposure time to hostile fire. Therefore, to improve the military benefit of an Attack Helicopter, the largest payoff can be expected when exposure time to hostile fire is reduced. The standard tactics for ordnance delivery by an attack helicopter are given in References 1 and 2. This paper presents a new tactic in ordnance delivery that materially improves the survivability of an attack helicopter. The cost effectiveness improvement is shown and avionic equipment complement described that is required to perform the new tactical maneuvers. When used in the Daylight Defense experiment at the Hunter Liggett Military Reservation, these tactics yielded poor exchange ratio values, because of long exposure times required to deliver ordnance.