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Yet Another Training Accident: Fort Hood Black Hawk Crash Kills One

REUTERS/Ints Kalnins.

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Jonah Bennett Contributor
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The U.S. Army has stated that a person was killed in a Black Hawk training exercise at Fort Hood on Tuesday evening.

Army officials say the 1st Infantry Division from Fort Riley in Kansas was making use of the HH-60M Black Hawk medical helicopter as part of the exercise when the helicopter crashed and killed one person south of the Robert Gray Army Airfield, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

The training involved medical evacuation hoists. For now, the Army is withholding details on the person killed until all next of kin have been notified of the death. It’s not clear how many soldiers were in the HH-60M when the incident occurred.

This most recent incident reflects a growing trend of training accidents, which has captured the attention not only of military leaders, who have been warning for years of the consequences of budget cuts, but also a growing number of members of Congress. In a Senate speech Wednesday regarding the annual defense budget bill, GOP Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, noted that in the past three years, four times as many service members have died from training accidents than from combat. McCain has long been an opponent of sequestration, which was enshrined in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and imposes “across-the-board” spending cuts.

“And yet as dangerous that these and other foreign threats are, perhaps the greatest harm to our national security and our military is self-inflected,” McCain said. “I repeat: self-inflicted. It is the accumulation of years of uncertain, untimely and inadequate defense funding, which has shrunk our operational forces, harmed their readiness, stunted their modernization, and as every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has repeatedly testified before the committed on Armed Services, put the lives of our service members at greater risk.”

McCain noted that 42 service members died in accidents during training exercises this summer alone, mentioning recent incidents like the USS Fitzgerald, the USS John S. McCain and the Marine Corps Kc-130 crash in Mississippi.

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