Cost-Effective Helicopter Options for Partner Nations

Department of Defense assistance to partner nations often entails supporting their helicopter fleets. In some cases, these fleets are composed of nonstandard rotary-wing aircraft, usually Soviet-era or Russian, European, Chinese, or outdated American equipment. Partner use of these aircraft poses particular problems for U.S. security cooperation activities; understandably, the U.S. military does not have a large base of expertise to support these aircraft in such areas as flight crew training, maintenance, and supply chain management. RAND's National Defense Research Institute identified the aviation requirements of important partner nations, applied this understanding to an analysis of the relative efficiencies of a variety of helicopter platforms, and used these findings to quantify the cost-effectiveness implications of migrating partner nation fleets to alternative aircraft.