presented by Bell

The Bell 360 Invictus for the Army’s FARA program provides penetrating force for multi-domain operations and the Great Power competition. Photo courtesy of Bell.

Doctrine for joint air operations in the era of the Great Power competition against China and Russia calls for an aircraft with speed and range for air assault and another one with penetrating force to disable air defenses. This doctrine applies to both vast ocean distances of the South China Sea and mountain ranges of Eastern Europe. The capabilities of speed, range, attack, endurance, and reconnaissance are also key drivers behind Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), as well as new force structures such as the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations, the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations, the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, and the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment.

The Biden Administration’s March 2021 Interim National Security Strategic Guidance states: “In the face of strategic challenges from an increasingly assertive China and destabilizing Russia, we will assess the appropriate structure, capabilities, and sizing of the force, and, working with the Congress, shift our emphasis from unneeded legacy platforms and weapons systems to free up resources for investments in the cutting-edge technologies and capabilities that will determine our military and national security advantage in the future.”

When command decisions need to be made within that new strategy, few elements will be more important than speed and penetrating force when quickly and successfully executing those commands—especially for the Army’s long-range air assault and attack-reconnaissance missions. Those are some of the rationales for the Army’s two, funded Future Vertical Lift (FVL) programs: the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) and the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA).

Together, FLRAA and FARA plus Air Launched Effects create an ecosystem of complementary capabilities that address the DoD’s specific, yet-different Great Power challenges wherever they occur on the globe.

The Differentiator for the FLRAA Mission

Bell is competing for both programs—offering the Bell V-280 Valor for FLRAA and the Bell 360 Invictus for FARA. Both aircraft have proven that they can provide the speed differential that the Army requires for mission execution in hours and minutes.

“If you don’t have the legs and the speed to get to an objective from a standoff location, or relative sanctuary, then you’re not going to be the force selected to prosecute a target because you don’t have the assets with the capability to get you there,” said Frank Lazzara, director, sales and strategy, Bell Advanced Vertical Lift Systems, who flew V-22s for Air Force’s Special Operations Command.

“Without being able to close on an objective or exploit temporary domain dominance with both speed and range, you become less relevant. Every one of our services has a very relevant role in the overall calculus for providing credible deterrence. None of us really want to go to war. You want to avoid war. There are a lot of tools to do that and one of them is the strength of the military, but if you don’t come from a position of strength through capability then you don’t have a credible argument.”

Bell’s Ryan Ehinger, vice president and program director,  Future Long Range Assault Aircraft, also points out that the V-280 tiltrotor has actually demonstrated 305 knots in level flight.

“There is no other configuration that has the efficient range and speed of a tiltrotor,” said Ehinger. “I think that is a differentiator for a future long-range assault aircraft. In addition, speed is an enabler for reducing the infrastructure that’s required for the armed forces in support of medevac and in amassing soldiers in periods of darkness. Speed is very important for general survivability of the platform.”

Having a speed advantage also translates into cost savings. If a mission can be executed in half the time, then the aircraft and its systems are only incurring half the flight hours.

“When you calculate the cost to execute missions in terms of dollars-per-flight hour you’re executing those missions in half the time, which is a significant improvement in the cost and affordability of executing these missions,” said Ehinger “So, whether you’re flying twice as fast as the enduring fleet or you’re flying 75 knots faster than a competing technology, speed matters in terms of being able to generate lifecycle and mission affordability.”

Artist illustration of the Bell V-280 Valor and Bell 360 Invictus.

The Differentiator for the FARA Mission

The Great Power competition and all-domain operations aren’t about just parrying China with the V-280’s range and speed, they’re also about targeting an increasingly belligerent Russia (and a few lesser powers like Iran and North Korea). It’s in Russia, Europe, and Eastern Europe where FARA provides superior capability that the Future Vertical Lift program is looking for.

“In the Great Power scenario, the Army is looking to have a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft that is actually a penetrating force that enables FLRAA and its reach to exploit some of that penetration created by FARA,” explained Chris Gehler, Bell’s Vice President and Program Director Bell 360, Future Attack and Reconnaissance Aircraft

“The Bell 360, besides having the needed reconnaissance capability, has the all-domain ability to be the quarterback of fires to defeat air-defense threats and enable the FLRAA to do its mission. The Army thinks about both programs as being complementary, not just one in isolation.”

Since the retirement of the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior observation aircraft, that attack/recon role has been filled by the AH-64 Apache, which is slower, has shorter range, lacks any all-domain capabilities, and is costly to support. Hence the Army’s requirement for FARA.

Just as speed and range are key attributes of the V-280, so, too, are they for the Bell 360 in the European Great Power context. Bell’s Invictus will, at a minimum, do 180- plus knots where a standard Apache will do only 120 knots in a mission configuration. Not only is the Bell 360 designed to fly fast, it does so by bringing weapons and capabilities inboard to reduce drag and also enhance survivability in a mission scenario.

And then there’s the aircraft’s reach. One of its main purposes is to have time on station at distance. A standard FARA mission could stretch out 135 nautical miles with a time on station of one to two hours depending on mission load. At that distance, the Apache would have virtually no time on station.

That type of reach is significant for commanders, and that type of agility at an operational level helps the Army modernize at a level commensurate with the threat posture.

A Need for Speed, As Well As Range, Agility, Survivability and Supportability

For the Army, speed is vital but so is range, agility, survivability, and supportability for what is being called “high-end conventional warfare”. This is, in essence, another name for the Great Power competition: large-scale, force-upon-force, high-intensity conflict against near-peer/peer adversaries.

“Many DOD acquisition programs, exercises, and warfighting experiments have been initiated, accelerated, increased in scope, given higher priority, or had their continuation justified as a consequence of the renewed U.S. emphasis on high-end warfare,” states the September 2021 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report entitled, Renewed Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense—Issues for Congress.

Many new program starts in recent years are direct responses to that reality. These include the Air Force’s B-21 Raider stealth bomber, the Navy’s DDG(X) guided missile destroyer, the Army’s FVL program, as well as others like improved intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance capabilities, next-generation Global Positioning System and protected SATCOM, hypersonic and directed energy weapons, robotics and autonomous vehicles, and network-related endeavors in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.

Because of the development and budgetary risks associated with those programs, the DoD is emphasizing the need for innovation and speed in U.S. weapon system development and deployment.

“Success no longer goes to the country that develops a new technology first, but rather to the one that better integrates it and adapts its way of fighting,” says the CRS report. “Current processes are not responsive to need; the Department is over optimized for exceptional performance at the expense of providing timely decisions, policies, and capabilities to the warfighter. Our response will be to prioritize speed of delivery, continuous adaptation, and frequent modular upgrades.”

The Defense Department and industry have taken various actions in recent years to increase innovation and speed in their weapons development programs, specifically through the use of digital design capabilities, advanced modeling and simulation, and DevSecOps for software applications.

These are the capabilities that Bell has embraced in its approach to the development of the Bell V-280 Valor and Bell 360 Invictus programs.

“When we set out to create a clean-sheet design for the Army air-assault mission we took lessons learned from 600,000 hours of V-22 experience and tailored them toward air assault,” said Ehinger. “We focused on speed, range, payload, reliability, survivability, and agility, as well. You need all those things and more to be successful in that mission.”

Flight performance is obviously important when developing a new air vehicle. Early in the design stage, Bell created digital models and used analytical tools to make predictions that matched what the V-280 achieved in flight test. Making the transition from digital models into flight performance can be a hugely difficult step, which is reflected in the history of many other configurations.

“For V-280, we’ve overcome both first-generation challenges and those transition challenges from the digital models,” said Ehinger. “We’ve wrung those out in our V-280 flight-test program with almost 215 hours of flight time. We’ve knocked out a lot of these proof points in flight, demonstrating speed, range, the ability to do sling load operations or fast-rope deployment, as well as low-speed agility.”

Another critical piece is the aircraft’s air-vehicle and mission-systems digital backbone, Ehringer noted.

“The Army is telling industry what right looks like and we are listening. The key here for us is creating an infrastructure that provides the Army the freedom to control their own destiny and ensure competition and affordability in the future. We are not trying to force a pre-existing solution that over-constrains the Army in the long term.”

FLRAA and FARA as Cost Savers

At the strategic, operational level, the FLRAA and FARA platforms are going to be long-term cost savers for the Defense Department budget compared to what’s being spent now on legacy Black Hawk and Apache helicopters. The V-280 and Invictus are not inexpensive aircraft, but they are going to have lifecycle costs that address the DoD’s twin imperatives of meeting the Great Power competition head on while doing so in an affordable and sustainable manner.

As much as the DoD modernizes the legacy fleet by hanging new sensors and other systems on legacy aircraft, we’re still looking at four-decade-old platform architectures that have reached the limits of their capabilities and what the military has been able to do with them. Multiply those limitations by more than 2,000 Black Hawks and approximately 800 Apaches, and there’s a lot of money being spent on old technology and your father’s aircraft platforms with little upside or future.

Never mind that none of these legacy aircraft have the capability for modular, open-system architecture (MOSA) for the networking and data processing needs of all-domain operation and Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

“I don’t think anyone envisioned in the seventies and eighties that these aircraft would be pushing through 2020 and out to 2040 or 2050,” said Gehler. “The Army’s vision is to develop capabilities for multi-domain operations and what they think the battlefield requires. But with the reality of what Congress enables and funds, they really can’t afford to operate aircraft, these legacy aircraft, the way they have been. Nor can they upgrade them through something like MOSA without spending serious amounts of funding. We’ve reached a point where modernization is hamstrung.

“There’s also the aircraft-capability element of FLRAA and FARA. When you think about the physics of moving helicopters through the air, there’s not much left that you can do with the Black Hawks and Apaches to get better reach or speed. They’re just at their limits.

Better Equipment to Deter and Fight

The emergence of the Great Powers competition—only now compounded by the end of the Afghanistan war and the need for standoff, distributed, and networked capabilities—has led to new operational concepts and weapons, platforms, and sensors all tied into integrated battle networks that are designed to maintain and improve upon the enduring advantages that the U.S. has always held.

Long-range air assault and attack/reconnaissance have long been core competencies for the Army expertise. With the tiltrotor-based Bell V-280 Valor for FLRAA and the Bell 360 Invictus for FARA, the Army will be better equipped to deter and fight in multi-domain environments, and prevail in the Great Power competition.