The Army, in its infinite penny pinching wisdom, chose not to equip the helicopters with air conditioning which is standard equipment on the commercial version of this aircraft. You must remember that this is the same outfit that was buying berets from a Chicomm company to save money.
We could try these birds in Alaska but they probably couldn’t take the extreme cold.
The DoD flies around VIPs, does MEDEVAC, has it’s own internal administrative flights and other things to consider. This platform is to do the busy work for which you don’t need a more expensive, much more powerful UH-60, currently used to do a lot of these things. We are procuring 322, a relative (for our DoD) small number. Consider that UH-60 alone we bought over 2600, OH-58 over 2000, CH47 near 1000 plus CH53, CH46, etc. The DoD is buying a small number because this machine fills a small niche; the light small utility helicopter, not really intended for combat but things which especially the National Guard finds themselves doing often.