Design Considerations for Helicopter Effectiveness in Air-to-Air Combat

Helicopters will play a key role in tommorrow's battlefield, performing tasks of troop transport, logistics support, medical evacuation, battlefield surveillance, electronic warfare, reconnaissance, targeting, and attack; but tomorrow's helicopters will also face an increasingly lethal, numerous, and determined air threat. What characteristics and weaponry will enable them to survive? Improved performance of aircraft, weapons, and sensors all are needed to counter well-armed high-speed threat helicopters with turreted guns, command-guided missiles, and rockets. Simple strap-on installations of current weapon may not be an adequate counter. Future weapons promise to be smarter, faster, and more lethal. Sophisticated, integrated approaches will be needed. New methods are needed to understand the required improvements in design and weaponry, methods that sort out mission and equipment possibilities and evaluate likely engagement conditions, that explore tactics as well as equipment, that can be verified by actual or simulated air combat, and that are sensitive to the capabilites of detection and acquisition sensors and potential mixes of weapons. This paper explores some of these design issues and reviews the state-of-the-art of approaches to their resolution.