If You're DOD, The Answer Is About $21 Million

Ever wonder what the DOD spends on all those high-tech helicopters like Apaches and Blackhawks? The Fiscal Year 2005 supplemental budget -- the US Government fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30 so we're almost halfway -- finds the Army requesting money to replace aircraft lost in the war.

They're not asking for money for Kiowas or Little Birds, they have whole fleets of them in storage, but they need to completely replace 13 AH-64 Apaches and five UH-60 Black Hawks that have been lost in accidents or enemy action, mostly in Iraq and some in Afghanistan.

That's $371.9 million for 18 helicopters, or an average of $20,661,111.11.

Now, that number is wrong in a couple of ways... firstly, because it's the product of a mathematical operation on a rounded figure, it appears to be more precise than it really is. The "$371.9 million" figure, which came from a newsletter called "Inside the Army" published by InsideDefense.com, is certainly a rounded-off number. Secondly, because we are looking at two dissimilar types, we don't have the exact cost of either -- Apaches cost more than Blackhawks.

But we can break this out, if we can accept a little imprecision. Now, I seem to recall from discussions with Sikorsky that the latest UH-60 Blackhawk, all-up, is about $15 million. That would explain why civilian operators don't use many of the powerful birds -- a rare exception is well-heeled LA County, which got its versatile Firehawks by lucking into a third-world air force's "going out of business" sale. That means that about $75 million of this supplemental is buying the five 'Hawks, and the rest -- $296.9 million or so -- goes to buy Apaches.

That would put the value of each individual Apache at about $22.8 million.

I guess one won't be joining the Aero-News fleet anytime soon. Dang!

FMI: www.army.mil