US Army to shift aviation force structure back to tailored brigades
By Jen Judson
Apr 25, 08:49 AM
DENVER, Colo. — The U.S. Army’s aviation force structure will move away from modular Combat Aviation Brigade designs needed during heel-to-toe rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan and return to a model that tailors those units for specific divisions, according to the service’s branch chief.
“Today we have modular CABs, so every CAB looks the same on paper,” Maj. Gen. Mac McCurry, the Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence commander, told reporters April 24 during the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual summit in Denver. During heel-to-rotations “it was imperative that we’d be able to replace a [heavy] capability with a light capability and those changes to modular CABs happened in the early 2000s,” he said.
The Army is returning to what it did prior to years of operations in the Middle East and will design division-based formations that do not look the same.
For example, McCurry said, “a light infantry division is more reliant on mobility than a heavy division is from the air, those soldiers have to move, rapidly reposition. We’re putting more [UH-60] Black Hawk [utility helicopters] into the light divisions and taking some of those Black Hawks out of the heavy divisions and heavy divisions remain focused on lethality.”
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2024/04/25/us-army-to-shift-aviation-force-structure-back-to-tailored-brigades/
