Two Venoms, accompanied by aviation engineers, logisticians, and technical support staff, have been dispatched to maintain full operational autonomy.
The UH-1Y and AH-1Z, are next to the AH-64, the most effective C-UAS resilient platform on earth, certainly the best you can buy right now that isn’t theoretical. Especially for maritime operations or highly mobile sustained deployment.
Good to see them deployed for what they do best.
Although primarily fielded as a utility platform, the UH-1Y Venom is uniquely armed among its global counterparts, capable of delivering both suppressive and precision-guided fires during multi-domain operations. Its modular armament system allows it to transition fluidly between troop lift and armed escort roles without major structural reconfiguration.
The same UH-1Y that downs a drone could turn around and do an improvised evacuation of victims of a strike, all without requiring any fixed infrastructure to sustain that can easily be targeted. They also aren’t a dead end investment, you can do anything you need to quick in a UH-1Y, not just blow stuff up.
I just wish these could make it to Ukraine. Can you imagine one of these roaring up to a hospital helipad with rescued victims from a mass drone strike the Venom spent the beginning of the flight shooting down, the chainguns and launch tubes still smoking…? That would be a glorious sight.