Anyone else find it odd that soldiers attached to a "Mountain" division are based in the VA Tidewater and operating boats? :icon_tong
Ft Eustis is little known (at least in Navy circles) as their Mecca of transportation (Army Chief of Transportation resides there) and their equivalent of the Naval Air Warfare Centers for Rotorcraft and UAVs, the
Applied Aviation Technology Division (AATD). Regardless, Army has a lot of boats and beat Navy to looking at HSV. Urban legend is they have more aircraft and pilots than Air Force (mainly Warrants) and more boats and boat drivers (mainly enlisted) than Navy. All my rides on Stiletto were captained by CCD coxswains though.
Stiletto was begun as an Office of Force Transportation project and transitioned to OSD AT&L Rapid Reaction Technology Office after untimely death of VADM Cebrowski. Since it is an OSD sponsored platform, it is available for use by all the services so Army can ask for time with it as could Air Force (if they wanted to). However, the RRTO action officers have always been Navy SWOs (exception was Glaros who was an aviator/former SWO).
Pill_Hacker said:
Weren't they trying to find a private buyer for that thing?
OSD cannot "sell" its wares to private buyers. Anything declared excess is offered to other services first and then shipped to DRMO for disposition where the public can bid on items. Stiletto was offered to all the services for potential utilization. It is actually subscale model to prove power fraction of composite hull. Hope was a successful design would yield more designs of various sizes. M Ship press release is certainly optimistic of garnering attention and sales.