Retiring Kiowas will find home in law enforcement.

The Army's OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter will see an active retirement when it is replaced by a future armed reconnaissance helicopter, according to the program manager for scout and attack helicopters.

After the war, they could end up in the hands of homeland security agencies, which are eager for additional airborne assets.

"I'm going to give every one to law enforcement," asserted Lt. Col. Jeffrey Crabb, who heads the effort to retire the aircraft.

Crabb is experienced in transitioning military aircraft to law enforcement. He retired the Cobra fleet and sold the helicopters off to the U.S. Forest Service for use in fighting fires. Placing a Huey cargo hook, a 500-gallon bucket and snorkels onto a Cobra made it a fast and effective firefighting system, he said. A forward-looking infrared system is used to spot the hottest cores of fires, providing targets for aerial drops of chemical retardants.

Crabb said foreign and domestic sales also supplement the disposal of retired aircraft.

"In the end, we'd have to just destroy them. You can't sell them on eBay," Crabb said, before noting that a reconstructed Cobra did indeed go on sale on the Internet auction site before the FBI halted the bidding. "A man put together enough parts to make one," he said.

The RAH-66 Comanche was meant to replace the aging scout helicopter, but when that $6.9 billion program was killed in February, the Kiowa was called on to perform in the breach. Now the fleet must fly until the Comanche's replacement, for now simply called the armed reconnaissance helicopter, is ready to enter service.

"We haven't been investing in the Kiowa because we had Comanche on the horizon," said Paul Bogosian, program executive officer for Army aviation.

That has changed, since Kiowas have many missions to complete before they are allowed to retire from military service. These sturdy aircraft are finding multiple missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A comprehensive safety enhancement program has been designed to help the battle-worn Kiowa fleet reach retirement age--and keep the pilots who fly them alive.

The helicopters have been scoured over for ways to reduce weight, because the aircraft are operating at the front edge of their power margin. They will receive crash-attenuating seats, cockpit airbags, a faster modem and data storage system, a digital camera and better self-defense weapons, Crabb said. Other weight reduction items include a smaller, more powerful battery, lightweight flat panel, color displays and a thorough stripping of paint layers that can add unneeded weight to the power-starved machines. "A couple hundred pounds is a big deal," Crabb said. "We want to give power back to the pilots."

Money from the scrapped Comanche project was used for some renovations, but a $16 million appropriation from Congress allowed new weapons to be purchased--GAU-19s Gatling-style guns.

Currently placed on board at least 20 Kiowas in Iraq, they will replace all the currently used .50 caliber arms currently embedded on the front of the helicopters. Crabb said the current system has earned a reputation as a sniper rifle because it shoots once, then jams. "Special operations (forces) swear by" the GAU-19s on their Little Birds, Crabb noted. "The key thing is that when you pull the trigger it will 100 percent fire."

The armed reconnaissance helicopter program office is rushing to move through the process as quickly as the bureaucracy, and legal constraints will allow. "We are not a development program," said Lt. Col. Neil Thurgood, armed reconnaissance helicopter program (ARH) manager for PEO aviation. "We'll take the state-of-the-art technology, we can use today ... We are not trying to build the Comanche. It's about having a man in the loop, operating forward."

The ARH must have the ability to deploy rapidly and be able to fight within 15 minutes of being offloaded from a C-130, Thurgood said. Mobile training units will be deployed with each squadron, he added.

The Army is moving fast, knowing the Kiowa's old airframe can't last forever. The formal request for the ARH proposal was issued in December, with plans to award a contract in June 2005. The challenges of this accelerated project are daunting. "I started in this Army as a private," Thurgood observed. "There's been days in this program when I thought I'd walk out as a private again."

In Iraq, more than a dozen Kiowas have been destroyed. Aircraft there log in 100 hours of flight time per month. A handful of Kiowas are deployed in Afghanistan, operating as high as 8,000 feet. Despite their age and grueling flight hours, the helicopters boast the highest readiness rate of any Army aircraft.

To managers, these aircraft have earned the right to a working retirement, and not a scrap heap. By 2012, Crabb said, all Kiowas would be retired from the military, fleet. However, rumors of the Kiowa's passing have come and gone, before. "That's the Army's story, and I'm sticking to it," said Crabb. "For now."