Short answer: The UH-60 is the Army's standard utility Black Hawk. The MH-60M is the special operations version flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne). It adds an air refueling probe, more powerful YT706 engines, multi-mode radar and a forward-looking infrared sensor for long-range night and bad-weather missions.
What the letters mean
In US military designations, the first letter is the mission. U is utility, M is multi-mission (on the Army MH-60, that means special operations) and H is search and rescue or medevac (the Army's HH-60M is the medevac Black Hawk). The suffix (L, M) is the model series. (DoD 4120.15-L, Model Designation of Military Aerospace Vehicles, May 2004)
How to tell them apart
The easiest tell is the refueling probe, the long boom on the nose of the MH-60M. A standard UH-60 doesn't have it. Our MH-60 hat art includes the probe, and the UH-60 hat doesn't.
Numbers
The Army objective under the current multi-year contract is 884 UH-60M, 419 HH-60M medevac and 72 MH-60M special operations Black Hawks (Sikorsky Archives, 2017). The 160th received its first MH-60Ms in 2011, and the last modification was shown in October 2015 (army.mil).
Sources
- DoD 4120.15-L, Model Designation of Military Aerospace Vehicles (May 2004)
- Sikorsky Archives, "Sikorsky S-70A: UH-60M Black Hawk Family" (2017): sikorskyarchives.com
- US Army, "Newest Black Hawk modification complete" (22 Oct 2015): army.mil