The only disagreement I have these thoughts is with the word “actual”. A better word might be “formal”.
Today’s article in Breaking Defense explains this better than I could. Comments at the end are interesting also.
https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/...ents-in-weeks/
I did read that article before my lengthy post. The key points here are that this is another RFI. RFIs are put out all the time. Army has put out multiple RFIs on FLRAA already, but there is still no identified date for an actual RFP. An RFP is where there's a real request for bids to produce/buy something real and where there's identified money. Also note that when and if there's an actual RFP, they want other companies involved, they specifically mention Karem. This indicates that there is a competition to come, not restricted to the JMR candidates. This is what Army always said would be the case. Still, the two JMR craft might be expected to have the inside track when and if a real compensation takes place. Got to love that govenmentspeak: "... the rest is really things that are pre-decisional that we have to socialize at echelon to make sure the team is ready to move forward.” In other words, 'We're not really doing anything yet, but we hope to".
I do find the statement, " “We know a lot about that lift-offset compound design already and it doesn’t necessarily need to fly as much...", quite interesting. X2 may be a great thing. But so far, all the vehicles for the last 40 years have been late, missed multiple announced deadlines, haven't flown all that much (example, either XV-15 30-40 years ago flew more hours that all the X2s combined. So have the AW609s) and except for showing that they can fly fast in a straight line, what of their promised performance breakthroughs have been shown? My point being not that X2 is bad, just that it's hard to say we know a lot about it.
Possibly Army doesn't want to be perceived as limiting "competition", plus there are a lot of lobbyists who will go into overdrive if Army says, we want a variant of a technology with a lot of demonstrated applicability. This would mean Bell, with their Tilt-Rotors, Karem who is working on a variant of Tit-Rotor technology and AVX which is championing a coaxial compound that is much close to Kamov's concept, but more advanced.
My big worry remains that FLRAA will fade away as Army gets excited about their "proprietary" FARA. FARA actually has a real schedule, including a real RFP and identified money.
I do find the comments interesting and agree with most of them.