To me, the V-22 is probably the DoD program that most symbolizes the current US military crisis. A naive belief in the idea that "progress" will solve all design challenges, married to a US obsession with "wunderwaffen" to make up for secular strategic weakness.
Tiltrotors as a concept are fantastically hard to design right, even when compared to helicopters. But there was at one point a genuine belief that there'd be a huge civilian demand for these things. But their unreliability and insane costs to operate couldn't be solved.
At some point, I think the US crossed the event horizon regarding how it thought about the role of military procurement as such. As the Germans realized they couldn't match their enemies in industrial output, they clung to the idea of winning through *more advanced* weapons.
Given the massive disparity today between what the US can produce and what China can produce, there's no way for the US to win a peer conflict if raw industrial output decides the outcome. US weapons can no longer be "good enough", as they were in WW2. They have to be *better*.
This hunt for increasingly more fantastical capabilities, for high-tech, "next generation" gear that will "revolutionize warfare as we know it" has gone from being a bad habit to being a sort of ideological compulsion. But in the end, all it does is drive complexity and cost.
Hitler's obsession with heavier and heavier tanks was a sign of German strategic defeat, not design genius. Sure, in certain tactical situation, something like the Jagdtiger was nearly invincible to US weaponry. But the Jagdtiger was a war-losing weapon, not a war-winning one.
The USMC version of the Osprey, according to the last GAO figures I looked at, had an hourly cost of operation north of *eighty thousand dollars*. As such, the V-22 appears almost as the military equivalent of a wicked Witch's curse.
The V-22 was just another one in the line of revolutionary platforms meant to give the US a massive advantage over other nations. And sure, in some ways, it is true. Very few countries other than the US could hope to build a functioning tiltrotor. But nobody else *wants to*.
At $80k per operating hour, the V-22 is a weapon the US pointed at itself. It is a service-destroying platform, not just through accidents (though the V-22 has been famously accident-prone during development) but through the literally *debilitating* cost of operating it.
That's the story of the US military. It is constantly shrinking, becoming smaller and smaller, straining under the massive self-imposed burden of maintaining all these fantastic "wonder weapons" that rarely work as well as they should, and who are completely unaffordable in war.
The V-22 Osprey is likely going to be the only tiltrotor ever made. It's kind of a neat concept in theory, and in the world of Star Trek where resources are infinite, maybe you'd have a few of them around. But in the universe we live in, the V-22 was a costly cul-de-sac.
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