The MC-130 community trains to this extensively; the 160th is one of our primary customers. I've worked Little Birds on both prepared strips and dirt LZs; the community as a whole is proficient at both. -130s get stuck from time to time, it happens even in training, especially at strips that haven't been used much. I had a colleague almost get stuck doing Little Bird Infil at Red Devil LZ in CO during a Bi-Lat, was a close thing. The CV discussion is a valid one but people are missing the most likely reason those guys weren't playing on this one (open kimono, I'm speculating). It's probably was a logistics issue. It takes quite a while to deploy Ospreys; they usually have to go by boat if deploying from CONUS. If you fly them any serious distance the TAAR requirement is significant. If you have them do gas and gos you'll leave a trail of broken -22s to your FSB; they just break a lot. Their logistics footprint is also quite large, read a lot C-17 flights to move their support tail. They also aren't a great fast rope/hoist platform and they have pretty serious weight limitations at high DAs.