We have published a new book in our airpower and naval modernization series. This book focuses on the Osprey and its evolution since 2007.
As the United States faces a global overload of strategic challenges and the concomitant challenge of shaping an effective and capable force to deal with these challenges but having serious budget stringencies, leveraging the unique capabilities which the United States already possesses is crucial.
Whether it be the Aegis global enterprise, or the F-35 global enterprise or the tiltrotor enterprise, the United States has shaped unique warfighting capabilities which it can leverage as it shapes effective forces moving forward for todays and tomorrow’s challenges.
This is a story of a unique capability which has reshaped the USMC in ways that are unimaginable without it. It has given the USAF special operational capabilities and now the U.S. Navy will experience a very different capability and approach to sustaining its distributed fleet.
As the U.S. Army focuses on how to distribute its force, the new tiltrotor capability will become a backbone for an effort to leverage speed and range which no rotorcraft possesses.
And has LtGen (Retired) Karsten Heckl concluded in his forward to the book:
“Over the years, as I’ve conducted interviews and had discussions with Dr. Laird, it occurred to me, how did an aircraft with the ability to carry our nation’s sons and daughters into and out of harm’s way, farther, faster, and at lower risk, somehow become maligned as an example of government waste and come under unprecedented, if not absolute irrational scrutiny, despite a safety record that previous rotor craft could only dream of?
“Dr. Laird has been interested in my perspective, is because I had a front row seat to this constant mismatch between rhetoric and reality that has taken place over the last two decades.
“Dr. Laird has done an incredible job capturing the reality, the true story of the MV-22 Osprey…an assault support aircraft without comparison, and I highly commend this book.”
The timeline of operational development since the introduction of the MV-22 in 2007 in Iraq has seen the expansion of the concept of operations of the USMC as the aircraft numbers and use multiplied over the past decade and a half.
The learning curve of the USMC and the evolution of industrial support and engineering capabilities for the platform have shaped new ways to use the aircraft for distributed operations across the spectrum of warfare.
And the creation of a core industrial capability to shape the drive forward in tiltrotor evolution coupled with the innovations of the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy in using the aircraft have created a unique tiltrotor enterprise.
How did we get here?
And what is the path forward?
And how might the U.S. military leverage this unique capability moving forward to deal with strategic challenges they face in global operations?
And how has the payload revolution which has enabled a kill web transformed the Osprey into a multi-domain warfighting capability as well?
This book tells the story of the evolution of the tiltrotor aircraft from the time of its introduction into combat in Iraq in 2007 and begin the story of the development of the new variant of the aircraft being designed by Bell and the U.S. Army.
In addition to this volume, a second companion volume will be published 15 September 2025 to provide additional interviews with warfighters and industry which enhance the argument made in this book. In addition, there are insightful essays for analysts and practitioners of the tiltrotor art.
The two volumes together form a more complete sense of the experience generated by the tiltrotor enterprise.
