MILITARY US MARINE CORPS RECAPITALISATION
King Stallion
The Corps’ current heavy-lift helicopter, the
Sikorsky CH-53E Sea Stallion, is the next
type in line for replacement; 200 CH-53K
King Stallions are being procured. Providing
over twice the lifting capacity of the older
version, the CH-53K is designed to lift a
battalion of Marines and their equipment
from the deck of a ship, 100 miles ashore in
one period of darkness.
Despite some crossfire during its
development for its cost, General Davis says
no other helicopter in the world can match the
CH-53K’s capability: “Unit cost of a CH-53K
is $88 million and a V-22 is about $79 to 80
million, so about the same, but you can’t
compare the two. I could buy other airplanes,
but I’d have to buy three times as many. I
could do that, but I’d also have to have three
times the number of maintainers [and] I’d have
to have a ship with enough room on the deck
to fit the additional airplanes. So to me, we’re
paying a fair bit of money for the CH-53K,
but we’re getting an outsize impact. It’s a true heavy-lift helicopter that has incredible
capability. If we could have found a cheaper
alternative we’d have done it, but there’s
nothing out there that can do what this thing
can do.
“When you’re operating at range, it’s not
just about logistics, it’s all about logistics. If
you’re in a fight out there, you want to build
a littoral logistics capability and there’s no
better friend when you’re flying relief supplies
in on a humanitarian relief mission, than
36,000 pounds of stuff. It has more then
twice the lift and so it’s a physics problem.
If I need ammunition or food to sustain
and support or help a friend in need, I can
get the stuff there three times as fast, with
one airplane, than I can with three other
airplanes, and there’s nothing else that can
do 100kts – that’s the design specification.”Electronic warfare strategy
General Davis said the Marine Corps’ future
electronic warfare strategy is a distributed
strategy, with the F-35 at its core: “I’m not
able to talk to you about all of the things the
F-35 can do, but it does a lot of things that
we’ve never been able to do before with a
platform, so it’s a tremendous capability.
“You have to watch them operate to
understand how that comes together,
electronic warfare, self-escort strike, sensor
fusion. We’re going to get out of the EA-6B
Prowler business in 2019. It’s been a great
airplane for us, but it’s what we call a high-
demand, limited density asset – a Prowler
can’t land on an amphibious ship, so it can’t
be out there with the Marine Expeditionary
Units, you have to co-locate it nearby so
many a time we preserve those assets for
the bigger fights.”
The Marine Corps’ concept is to bring an
electronic warfare capability to everyone,
including the individual Marines in the
foxholes. Gen Davis explained how the
Marine Corps has developed a capability
called Intrepid Tiger, which started out as a
surveillance and jamming system housed
in a pod first used on the AV-8B Harrier:
“Then we put it on our F/A-18s; it’s on our
UH-1Ys, and it’s going on our Zulus [AH-
1Zs], MV-22s, C-130s and our CH-53Ks. We
also building an RF jammer under Intrepid
Tiger Block 2X, which allows every single
platform to become a jamming platform.”Credit Lockheed Martin
The first operational flight of the Intrepid Tiger II (V)3
electronic warfare pod from an amphibious assault
ship, the USS Wasp (LHD-1), took place in August- The Intrepid Tiger II EW pod is shown loaded
to a UH-1Y Huey helicopter with Marine Medium
Tiltrotor Squadron 264 (Reinforced) assigned to
the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit. Lance Cpl Koby
Saunders/US Marine Corps