Defence chief Angus Houston advised the Rudd government in April 2009 that the army should not deploy its battlefield helicopters to Afghanistan because they lacked protective armour and defence systems, even though there was a project under way to upgrade 12 Black Hawks.
Australia never deployed its Black Hawks, despite special forces troops saying the aircraft would have made combat operations more effective and safer.
This issue is relevant now given the latest deployment of 400 special forces troops to Iraq. While Australia has deployed FA/18s, support helicopters are not part of the plan. It means Australia’s 30-plus fleet of Black Hawks has never served in combat. Mr Houston advised then defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon it was more practical to utilise “the pooled resources of our allies in Southern Afghanistan than it is to allocate more of our heavily committed Black Hawks”, according to documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws.
But he noted the Black Hawks’ deficiencies were “being addressed in a project to provide a self-protection suite to allow operations in high surface-to-air threat environments”. Mr Houston was referring to Project Echidna, which applied armour and air defence systems to helicopters and C-130 transports.
Five Black Hawks had been modified when the government announced it would abandon the project, in September 2009. Cutting the project saved $50 million.
The fix for all this? The disastrous MRH-90.
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