Originally Posted by
Hilife
A good point.
Although, the precursor to FLRAA was JMR/FVL and in the early days, it was not so much about speed and range (I believe 230kn and a combat radius of 263nm were the original JMR-Medium requirements), but about getting a solution that provided a broad range of advanced capabilities, technologies and efficiencies.
At the point of having to choose a preferred solution in late 2022, I'm not convinced either TD provided what the US Army had envisioned way back in the early days of JMR, but the move away from Europe to the Pacific, with range and speed being two key factors, certainly for any USMC solution, kinda left X2 behind.
That and Team Defiant were clearly not on the same page when it came to interpretating the requirements the way the author had intended.
JMR-Medium was initially an $80Bn program for some 4,000 machines, but it does not look like the FLRAA solution will end up anything like being that big, which for me, backs up my 2nd paragraph, but time will tell.
As always when the Gov't is involved, there's an alphabet soup. JMR/JMR-TD was the technology demonstration phase and it provided data to FVL, which was for operational vehicle; FLRAA and FARA are two of the operational vehicle categories for which one aircraft will be selected for each. The Marines my choose to leverage FLRAA technology, but it's not a guarantee that they'l just l buy a marinized version of the V-280. Regarding FARA, USMC does not have the kind of mission for which it is designed..
Nothing is ever simple.