Killer Bees for the Army!

No, not the start of a bad "B" movie plot...

Murdoc the Mighty links to this interesting article about the utility of very light helicopters.

I am not an airdale or a ground pounder so I can't really comment as to the utility of this with even the authority of a reserve E-4, but I think that a lot of these jobs are going to be done by UAVs in the near future (indeed they're being done by them now). The articles larger point about the need for numbers, maintainability, and mobility seem quite valid.

Building on the ideas in the article and well as adding some interesting ideas of their own (or resurrecting the rather dynamic ideas of General Quesada) the guys over at Combat Reform have a link-happy series of articles on the future of airmobility, close air support and the technologies thereof.

Again, as a layman, it seems that a good number of these can be done with UAVs, though, of course, not all. There is a lot of cool out of the box thinking on these pages and whatever their utility, its really cool reading.

The page on Autogyros and compound helicopters, while several years old now are quite prescient with the recent developments regarding DARPAs funding of Groen Aviations Proposal and the progress being made with compound helicopters (scroll down to the 4th text block...but the whole article is interesting for other reasons).