There was a fantastic article and analysis I read some weeks ago that addressed this issue, and I'm trying desperately to find it. However, I remember the key points, and I'll surmise them here:
- The A-10's survivability is overrated. The Air Force conducted studies after both Gulf Wars and found that the A-10 was taking higher damage per sortie when compared in '91 to '03. That Iraq's air defense was in shambles didn't seem to diminish the fact that the A-10 was becoming more vulnerable to more sophisticated weapons. Technology has made cheaper weapons more effective since the 1970s in which this was designed. In a higher threat environment, the lack of sophisticated sensors, threat identification, and ECM is seen as not boding well.
- The A-29 is a fantastic plane. But it's giving the A-10 a run for it's money, not the F-35. In the low-threat COIN environment, it has all of the benefits of the A-10 with none of the drawbacks. That famous cannon isn't always idea against militants in the mountains when you're worried about spraying your own troops. That the A-19 can carry small guided weapons just like the A-10 gives it capabilities where it counts. And it's half to a third of the price to purchase and maintain.
So the A-10 is getting squashed from two sides: The F-35 can penetrate the high-threat environment, and provide CAS in a lethal SAM environment, while the A-29 can provide CAS/COIN against militants in a low to non-existent threat environment. There is no middle ground. It left when air defense systems gained the sophisticated tracking and accuracy that wasn't there in the 1970s and 80s.
The A-10 was a fantastic plane and well designed for the time in which it was envisioned to fight. But even I agree that it's time has passed. Like the F-14, it's sad to see it go, but I think it's the right call.
"The Air Force’s F-35A version of the aircraft and hold 182 rounds. It’s slated to be externally mounted on the Marine Corps’ F-35B jump-jet variant and the Navy’s F-35C aircraft carrier version and hold 220 rounds"[1]
The F-35 has no hope of doing sustained CAS. It is another Air Force "drop your bombs and fire a few shots then run home" plane. An A-10 can keep insurgents away from your troops for a fair amount of time.
They should strip the Air Force of its CAS role and hand it back to the Army. Then the Air Force can concentrate on what it likes: strategic bombing and air dominance.
There's a lot more to CAS than simply how many bullets your gun has. In any case, it's often not the preferred weapon. Bullets are indiscriminate. Small, precision warheads are becoming more in favor because the safety margin is better.
We've been seeing quite a bit in Afghanistan now where CAS is actually being performed by a B-1 carrying a SNIPER pod, sitting up at medium altitude with a large load of small precision bombs.
But that shows you the type of environment Afghanistan is, where the Air Force can deploy high value assets like a B-1 to perform CAS, because their anti-air threat is non-existent. The Air Force is not developing the F-35 to fight insurgents, they're deploying it to fight a well equipped, conventional force that will have multiple layers of sophisticated weapons. They'll do everything they can to soften these up before the strike aircraft go in. But there /will/ be some that remain, and its in this environment, that the F-35 needs to survive.
In the low-threat environment against insurgents, you can do that job just as well as the A-10 with the A-29 as the article states, for ever cheaper.
This is the conclusion that the Air Force has come to, and that's why they're retiring the A-10.
My cousin has related stories of the A-10 watching over him and his troops. Bullets most definitely were the main item related. The A-10's ability to stay above his group and fire a couple of rounds every so often allow them to sleep. The F-35 or B-1 is not going to do that. Drones don't currently do that. The goal is to safeguard the troops and bullets work very well.
The Air Force hates CAS and will say anything to get out of it. The fact that a modern version of the A-10 has not been developed (the F-35 is not a modern version) says everything about the Air Force's direction.
People need to realize that while the A-10 is a good morale booster, it only carried out 20% of CAS missions in A-stan. The numbers just don't support its continued existence for anything but anti-tank warfare.
The A-10 is an obsolete concept. Weapons are so much more advanced than armor that the best defense is to not get hit. If you want cannon fire supporting you from above then you want an Apache.
> The Air Force is not developing the F-35 to fight insurgents, they're deploying it to fight a well equipped, conventional force that will have multiple layers of sophisticated weapons.
Essentially the F35 is the blu-ray of fighter planes.
Meh. Blu-ray as a storage medium is a nice upgrade from the DVD. Blu-ray as a movie delivery format on the other hand. Thing is that what blu-ray tried to do for movies, was already tried once before by using DVDs to produce higher bit rate CDs.
Thing is that mechanically neither product more convenience for Joe Consumer.
While the CD brought instant track selection vs the cassette (and was a more practical size than the LP), the DVDA/SACD didn't bring anything close vs the CD.
And similarly the DVD removed the whole rewinding issue vs VHS, never mind that you could now pack a whole series season in the shelf space of a single VHS movie.
Frankly i just wish that we could have something floppy like in terms of UI For BRRW discs. copy, paste, done, rather than having to mess with burner programs etc to lay out the disc beforehand.
Take a cube, half the size of each edge, and the cube weighs one eighth as much.
In this case, the 20% reduction in diameter, while keeping the same shape means the projectiles are less than half the size.
In a counter-insurgency role, the A-10 fires roughly 65 13.3 ounce high explosive shells in one second. Roughly 54 pounds of high explosive shells per second.
The F-35 is planned to fire 55 6.5 ounce projectiles per second. That's 22 pounds of shells per second.
54 lbs vs 22 lbs is a significant difference.
Though, as others have said, it's the ammo capacity that is the major problem with the F-35's proposed gun. Only being able to make one or two guns runs before being out of ammunition precludes any kind of sustained ground support.
If you’re shooting tanks then sure it's a significant advantage, but when the target is a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on the back you don't need that much penetrating power.
There are walls and other obstacles in the field that a gun designed to shoot through a tank can go through. You do need that much penetrating power to make sure their hidey hole is not safe.
The A-10 was designed for an anti-tank role. So, I suspect there rounds are generally overkill. A smaller round than you might think can penetrate a brick/cinderblock wall. For hardened targets an Air-to-Surface missile can have a lot more penetrating power. In the end some compromise between the two is probably ideal.
That said if you’re doing dedicated ground support I think you’re going to want a lot more round than an F-35 is designed for.
I am not sure, if you even need 25mmm in this particular case. I would say that with the right aiming even a machine gun will do it.
But when you do not look at the penetrating power alone, but the blowing effect, than a bigger round can hold more explosives (of course, I don't know, if the A-10 Gatling cannon can also take explosive rounds instead of the armor breaking rounds).
But of course the parallel poster is right: there are several things to penetrate -- particularly when partisans are heavily covered.
The A-10 cannon is not comparable with that of a modern tank. Just compare the numbers:
A-10: 30mm Gatling
M1 Abrams (and other comparable tanks): 120mm (Russland's newest tank has a 140mm gun as much I remember)
That is a huge difference! The only advantage of the Gatling is the high firing rate -- but it is definitively no match for the armor of a modern main battle tank. I also never implied that. When the A-10 was designed, tank armor was less advanced and today the A-10 is mostly fighting against light to medium armored targets. Many countries even in their regular army have still very old tanks in service.
You also get to add the forward velocity of the aircraft so it's Mass * (v1 + v2) ^2. Arguably the largest advantage of the A-10 is it keeps tank designs 'honest' as it's free to engage from just about any angle which forces tanks to add quite a bit more armor.
That is right. Most tanks are designed, that the frontal armor is the thickest and many of the WW2 tanks where very weak at the top. They where basically designed for frontal tank vs. tank (or anti-tank) attacks.
Today's tanks have to take air attacks into account -- with much better top armor but also better armor at the other sides too.
Your calculation is right, I guess, but still 120mm has just overwhelmingly more hitting power than 30mm rounds.
er that is the type of engament that the a10 is designed for top attacks on the thin armour - just as the ww2 stuka with 37 mm wasn't firing at the thick armour but the weaker top armour
It actually does. The 30mm is a heavier bullet (even without taking the depleted-uranium core into account), and the case holds more powder, so it has a higher velocity. Both of which add up to more energy imparted into the target.
War Is Boring have been running a series of articles over the past year or so about the effectiveness of the A-10 for CAS, and about how the F-35 is a "jack of all trades master of none" compromise that is also terrible at CAS.
They paint a compelling picture that the Air Force is stumping to ditch CAS as "unsexy" so they spin as hard as they can against the A-10.
War is boring's reporting on the F-35 has biased and is considered among defense reporting to be very un-reputable. "Jack of all trades master of none" is followed by "is better than master of one". It's replacing the F-16 which also was a multirole and did it damn well. The A-10 is just no longer an effective weapon. A turbo propt is better when you're fighting while having complete control of airspace and a F-35 is better when you're fighting in the presence of very advanced air defense systems. The A-10 is old and doesn't fit into modern warfare.
So the question becomes, are we prepping to fight the next war or prepping to fight the last one? Do we think we're going to be launching sorties over Russia or China or do we think we're gonna be fighting another Iraq war against ISIS?
War Is Boring is a terrible site for military news and analysis. I've read several articles that included elements that were factually wrong and obviously so to anyone with even passing knowledge on the subject.
A good example is their piece comparing aircraft carriers to battleships in the 1941, where they claimed the navy missed the danger of air attack on capital ships because it had never been done before. Ten minutes on Google would have been enough to keep someone from making that assertion.
Who cares about A-29 vs A-10? Both got shitcanned.
I agree the article's title sucks. The point is that military political dysfunction managed to get rid of all ground support airplanes while mumbling "F-35" when anybody asked about ground support.
Is there much appetite for ground based forward operation without guaranteed aerial supremacy? Ground support planes would be nice but getting and maintaining aerial control is what prevents war, at least it used to be the case. What has changed?
It doesn't prevent a war you start, among other things ;) Getting aerial supremacy in Afghanistan and Iraq was easy enough, but there still was/is ground warfare going on for a long time.
Aerial supremacy doesn't protect you against portable rockets or smaller AA guns, unless you are willing to just kill everything on the ground, which isn't really an option in the current scenarios. A bomber or fighter is relatively well protected against those by height and speed, close air support has to fly low and slow to properly engage targets.
I suppose that war has also changed - you can't just go destroying cities from the air to get a few insurgents when there are civilians in the general vicinity.
I find it funny that anyone believes F35 will be able to survive even in a range of a moderate quality SAM without massive support - it might be stealthy enough at this moment from the front, but it's rear is one huge bullseye for radar/ir
I think the important thing to understand there is that stealth is not a persistent, invulnerable defense. It's a mitigation; a defense with limitations. What it does do is give the F-35 the ability to get close enough to get the first shot, and eliminate the threat. In any air campaign, destruction of defenses is going to be prioritized, and hunting them will be the job of the F-35. That unfortunately is not something the A-10 can currently do.
The problem with that argument is that the purpose of the CAS use case isn't to wage an air campaign - it is to wage a ground campaign. That mean the plane will have to be able to stick around in the air for more than a trivial amount of time. Which in turn means that there can be hidden or mobile air defences that may get deployed while the fight is ongoing.
All true, but you're mixing up the profiles. In the Gulf era, you'd first send in stealth to take out C&C, AAA and SAM sites and get started on parked air forces. Then you'd send the fighters and escorted bombers to own the airspace and finish destroying their air force. That was the first few days. Then you'd be clear to go in with ground forces, which needed plenty of CAS against all the old Russian tanks. Then you'd be in for as many years as your budget allowed of going door-to-door and cave-to-cave on foot with CAS against "insurgents".
The new profile is that last part, at least for our current problems. If we're going up against the Russians or Chinese, then we'll be back to F35's doing standoff at 100 miles.
For some, yes. Works for stationary sites. For mobile or previously concealed systems, not so much. You need a way to re-target the weapon in flight, securely, and that's assuming you detect it. If it's a manned platform doing this, then it's more efficient to bomb it where you are (assuming it hasn't detected you in turn!) If it's a different platform, say, a stealthy drone, then you could conceivably direct a cruise missile strike, but this has its own challenges. Cruise missiles take a while to reach their destination, both because they're standoff weapons (hundreds of nm) and their relatively slow speed needed to achieve that range. All cruise missiles in the US inventory are subsonic, and the few international ones that are supersonic are good for only a few dozen km. Hunting mobile systems with cruise missiles isn't too practical for these reasons. Adversaries have been paying attention, and that all of us here can recognize that a US opening move will be "cruise missile wave" should tell you how well you can expect an adversary to be prepared for that.
I posted a link above where it went into detail the vulnerability the A-10 has to small mobile and man-portable missile systems. These warnings became evident in Desert Storm and only got more pronounced as this level of technology trickled down.
The A-10 was viewed as capable in the 70s and 80s, where your primary threats were guns and early mobile missile systems. And even then, the expectation was that the expected lifetime was not very long. They would delay and harass Soviet first-echelon forces, and pay a heavy cost for doing so.
That they took notable losses from a second-rate ground force that had been heavily attributed for 8 years against Iran told the Air Force that this day they would need to be retired would come sooner than expected. They were fine enough for the Balkans and Iraq in '03 when you could reasonably expect to eliminate most anti-air threats with the F-16, but this isn't expected to be feasible in the next conflict. Speed, sensors, and countermeasures (stealth and ECM) are what's needed. Low and slow won't be sufficient unfortunately. The A-10C got some of these improvements in the sensors and ECM department, but unfortunately it's not enough.
The point about mobile air defence actually makes a lot of sense. It still seems to me that a dedicated replacement to the A10 would be preferable to what the F35 has become.
Cruise missiles are $1m a piece and exist in precious quantities. In the previous conflicts, we'd only used them to soften up the air defense network, then send in the B-2's to take out the rest of the air defenses once its safe for them to fly. Once the B-2's are done, then its only safe to bring in regular fighters, choppers, troop transports, tanks, and bombers.
I'm not sure how the F-35 fits into this. One of the issues with the B-2's is that our fleet is tiny and they're super-expensive to run and carry limited ordinance. I suspect they may take some pressure off the B-2's with their mixed role.
F-35 is the stealthy sensor platform that can go closer to identify and target. Unlike F-22 it does air to ground as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be the platform that does all the shooting. It can spot for non-stealthy planes further back, or for land/sea based platforms. Basically the killer app of F-35 is providing better situational awareness to the whole coalition force operating in the area. It's much more valuable as a force multiplier than on its own. Super Hornet and the rest of that generation can hold their own 1v1, but they don't provide a similar benefit to the rest of system. It remains to be seen whether F-35 makes even EW jets like Growler obsolete. I suspect that the added human workload part of EW (F-35 doesn't have two seaters) is harder to overcome than developing suitable pods.
They will be carrying cruise missiles too. Because $1m is quite a bit less than $100m (the plane).
They're all talking about sending in the F-35 first, but to me you actually send in cruise missiles and or drones first to take out the known threats, and then send in the F-35 to take out in-flight enemy aircraft.
Assuming you have half decent satellite intelligence (which we know the US does), it doesn't make sense for the US to risk pilot's lives no matter what they're flying.
SAMs may be fine for shooting down airliners, but they're not very effective against fighters. You realize the US lost only one F-16 in the 2003 attack on Iraq, and that was to "fuel starvation"?
And no, the rear of the F-35 isn't much less stealth than the front. You're probably thinking of IR.
The article is surprisingly factual for an F-35 criticism.
The A-29 is a very capable aircraft in the CAS/COIN role, and has the advantage that its relatively cheap. The A-29 can't take battle damage like an A-10, although A-29 has the major advantage in that its cheap to purchase (less than $20m for the Program Unit Cost) and cheap to fly.
Two of the best CAS aircraft are the A-1 Skyraider and the A-37 Dragonfly. The propeller driven A-1 "Spads" were used to support the rescue of downed aviators over Vietnam. The A-37B (based on the T-37 Tweet) was flown by both USAF and South Vietnamese Air Force pilots quite effectively. These aircraft were cheap to operate, and accurate at weapons delivery.
I'd even go as far as saying the USAF should seriously consider "replacing" the A-37 as the "low" part of the high-low mix with the F-35. Keep the same size and side-by-side layout, and use avionics and "stealth" features of the MQ-9C Avenger [2]. This would enable piloted CAS missions, where drones are impractical.
>So the A-10 is getting squashed from two sides: The F-35 can penetrate the high-threat environment, and provide CAS in a lethal SAM environment, while the A-29 can provide CAS/COIN against militants in a low to non-existent threat environment. There is no middle ground.
Oh, but there is. The A-10 was primarily designed as a tankbuster. While the A-29 is fine for the CAS role against irregulars, in a war against a country with lots of armor you'd really want to have the A-10.
There's something similar in the world of jet aircraft too. The Textron AirLand Scorpion, built from off the shelf parts, designed to take a whole bunch of ordinary weapons systems, went from design to flying at air shows inside 3 years, without massive costs. It's a subsonic, twin jet plane with a stall speed around 100 knots, which costs ~$20m.
It's not remotely clever compared to the Eurofighter, Sukhoi Su-XX jets or similar recent generation multi-role aircraft, but for low speed engagement with flexible hardpoints and easy maintenance, it's hard to find many competitors. Which is weird, given the nature of most aerial combat roles for the past 15 years.
I thought of these fighters as well. Governments don't buy these because they don't want a 9/10 fighter. They'd rather buy a decades old 10/10 fighter even though they'll never need (and probably can't pay for) that extra 1/10.
> but had the plane been flying as low and slow as older generations of attack planes did, the crew might’ve realized their error simply by looking down at the ground.
There are a lot of WW2 incidents of friendly fire casualties from ground attack aircraft, both from aircraft attacking their own guys to aircraft being downed from anti-aircraft fire from their own side. This happened to all sides in WW2.
Also WWII had 4 major theaters, probably 100 000 000 troops mobilized or deployed, and production lines for armor and planes that would make Henry Ford gawk. The scale guaranteed that the friendly fire will occur often.
"A crew operating a high-tech fighter plane made a terrible mistake" -> "Had the crew been close enough to the ground to see their enemies, the mistake may have been avoided" -> "A-10's require pilots to be close to their enemies" -> "A-10's and planes that rely on dated technology are superior to those that utilize the latest and greatest weaponry."
This argument is useless without determining how many incidents like the example described at the beginning of the article occur, whether they could be avoided with an older plane, and whether the cost of the mistakes made by the newer planes outweighs the advantages they provide.
Afghans eventually withered down close Soviet air support. Soviet strategy seemed to be winning with new air and infantry tactics. Until they started losing hundreds of aircraft. If I remember correctly it was mostly heavy guns and not US Stingers that did the trick.
The enemy is well aware that all they have to do is win an endurance war against an inflexible bureaucracy that bleeds money and outlast the patience of a fickle populace. This was demonstrated recently enough in Vietnam. US strategy was losing, even though they won almost every fight in both wars.
It would take a lot more than this one cheap fighter to outlast the Afghans. At least body count was better this time.
A different plane would not have helped winning Afghanistan. suffering might have been even longer. The expectation to win there is an illusion.
Looking for technological solutions - low or high tech - is just more of the same misguided thinking. The case is lost in a totally different way - it's not technology.
Everything is winnable. But the pentagon is mostly a state/corporate subsidy program with some military capabilities as a side effect.
US hasn't been in a war they HAVE to win since WWII (and even then continental US was pretty safe) so the institutional knowledge that was bought with blood is soon forgotten.
Afghanistan was not won, because there was never a criteria for winning towards which the military and the state department to work. And the fact that US has the habit of cooperating with the wrong people in third world countries, makes things worse.
If the US had courts in Afghanistan in which to try corruption, Afghanistan would be a better country now.
Germany was winnable because after the fighting U.S. and other allies we're willing to occupy the area with huge number of troops for 50 years. Also Marshall plan.
Vietnam was not winnable because general population didn't support such high numbers for occupation. There we're practically no U.S. troops left for the last two years of the war.
Since Vietnam U.S. cannot use draft. So U.S. can only conquer one, maybe two countries while keeping Korea and Europe under control. But that leaves those troops bound on foreign soil. Which in turn limits U.S. power projection and therefore cannot be the long term solution.
Wars have not changed. DoD just would love to find a way to win wars without the ensuing occupation. And that's unlikely to happen.
No, as old Macchiavelli put it: if a country is hard to conquer, it will be easy to hold; if a country is easy to conquer, it is hard to hold. The reason is that a united, highly organized country fights hard, but it won't fall apart into dozens of factions after being conquered. Unlike countries like Iraq or Afghanistan.
I'm holding a copy of Prince and happened to find that verse. It's about Ottoman imperium and feudal France.
If there is a dictator and you simply become the new dictator, then keeping a country is easy. That would have been because none of the military leaders would have any loyalty among the people. But nationalism has happened since and it's questionable if this would hold anymore.
If there is large number of Feudal lords, this makes taking France potentially easy as some of them would betray the king. But on the other hand they would have loyalty of the people with them.
Times have changed, otherwise Iraq should be peace of cake now that Saddam is dead.
After Gulf War I, Saddam had to resort to brutal military actions to keep the various tribes from seceding. Afghanistan has been ruled by 'feudal lords' for a long time. Neither Iraqi nor Afghan soldiers were eager to die for their states, which were colonial constructs anyway. If the country you are invading implodes after a few days of fighting, you can expect trouble.
Occupation isn't the key, it is the willingness to inflict civilian casualties to demoralize the enemy to the point they can no longer fight.
We go out of our way to not harm civilians, the very same who likely are supporting the people we are trying to kill and this has the effect of extending the length of any war. There are some who claim inflicting civilian casualties only encourages the enemy but history has proven time and time again that simply is not true.
The Spanish-American war of 1898. The Philippine guerrillas on Mindanao were crushed so savagely and effectively the locals still associate the US with actions taken during that time period.
War is ultimately a contest of wills. It's not that you can't beat irregulars, it's that you have to be so brutal the folks at home won't tolerate it unless the threat is existential.
Still U.S. saw it best to install puppet and continue occupation for about a generation. There we're 20 000 troops in Philippines in 1941. In a country of about 16 million people.
There are over 30 million people in Afganistan and about 13000 Nato troops. If that works out, U.S. has gotten better occupying countries.
It is actually even worse. The US had the bomber mafia. But at least they were focused on the idea of hitting high-value industrial targets with daylight raids. If this had been carried out it would have removed the industrial capability of Germany.
The British also had a bomber mafia. But they were obsessed with nighttime raids that just carpet bombed cities. These were safer for crews, but completely ineffective. They just destroyed cities and massacred civilians.
You are correct that the UK nighttime raids were safer - but worth noting that they weren't safe in an absolute sense - 44.4% of Bomber Command aircrews were killed in action.
> ... obsessed with nighttime raids that just carpet bombed cities
The US and Britain agreement was to divide sorties in Europe into daytime (US) and nighttime (Britain), and pre-GPS accuracy at night pretty-much dictates aiming for vary large targets.
The obsession came with Dresden, but that seems to be a different point to the one you were making.
You are absolutely correct. But my point is the nighttime raids were not only a waste of resources, but they just killed civilians en masse. This didn't really do anything to change the war. Germany had no shortage of slave labor, so some dead civilians were just less mouths to feed.
Britain would have been better off just not building those bombers and bombs. The resources could have been diverted into something else. Maybe fighter escorts for the daytime raids?
I'm not trying to totally destroy the British contribution to the war. It is just that this policy of night time carpet bombing was totally misguided.
Sure, I admit I mainly took exception to the wording, not the actual points raised.
I disagree with you that RAF bombing achieved nothing though. Plenty of industrial facilities were destroyed, major dams, V2 rocket facilities, etc. If you lived in London then you'd probably be reasonably pleased by the destruction of a V2 facility, even if the long-term strategic difference was negligible.
You have to understand that we Brits are quite used to our armed forces contribution being erased from history by Hollywood so can be a bit defensive about Americans making sweeping generalisations in this area. We will argue you down to the details.
Using the V2 is a poor example, as that was a combined effort with both the British and the Americans. While Operation Crossbow it did achieve some of its goal, I can't find documentation that it was the RAF sorties that achieved damage to the V2 and its related infrastructure. I'm not terribly well versed in the history of the V2 during WWII, so I may just be missing it.
The best thing the Brits did was use double-agents to send the Germans misinformation about where they were striking. They gradually convinced the Germans that the rockets were landing on the far side of London harmlessly. The physics behind the V2 at the time clearly placed it as striking London, but the misinformation essentially demanded changes in the engineering. London was still hit plenty though, so this intelligence campaign was not a total success.
If this had actually been totally successful, the Brits might as well have helped Germany setup more V2 factories. Each V2 was extremely costly in terms of materials to produce. This removed available materials from the parts of the war effort that actually needed them.
The pre-GPS bombing accuracy during daytime isn't any better if it is a cloudy day, which happens more often in Europe than the western US where the USAAF had trained.
If someone makes same mistake twice - you relieve him of duty. That is as old principle as they come. Things get done by people that do different mistakes every time.
"The Hornet’s cost per flight hour? $25,000 to $30,000, according to official Navy figures. It’s estimated the F-35 costs anywhere between $31,900 to $38,400 per hour to fly."
So the F-35's lower hourly rate is almost the same as the Hornet's upper rate? Doesn't seem like that much of a deal.
The Hornet is an actual Jet and therefore those costs are real. The F-35 estimates are the most conservative that are legally defensible but will almost certainly much greater than that once actually in service.
Its important to note the air force number is something like unit budget divided by number of hours flown divided by number of planes, so its fairly realistic, but the specifically named manufacturer provided cost estimate is something like gas and oil and scheduled maint assuming nothing ever breaks and there's no enemy action and things wear out according to the blueprints.
Also it costs the same to feed a pilot of any aircraft, ditto ATC and commo guys and all the rear echelon folks, although none of those costs were included in the mfgrs estimate.
No matter how badly the numbers are fudged its probably still one order of magnitude cheaper, perhaps a little more.
The numbers I can find for operating JAS Gripen is roughly $4700, so there are some modern planes that are only one magnitude cheaper. However, many tend to not prioritize operating costs very high.
The Gripen is specifically designed for cost effectiveness. If you want a modern jet fighter with the most bang for your buck, the Gripen is the most obvious choice. If money is not an issue, there are plenty of better jets available.
What I got from reading this article is the impression that it makes absolutely no sense to use the F-35 for close-air support. It is inferior in performance and far more expensive to operate than the A-29 for CAS missions. Here in Canada, politicians are dithering and dickering over whether or not to buy the F-35 now that it's looking less impressive and the weak Canadian dollar has made it far more expensive. For some inexplicable reason, the prevalent idea is that the RCAF should own and operate just one model of fighter. This idea needs to change.
The reality is that Canadian planes have not engaged in air-to-air combat since the Korean war, but virtually every conflict the CF participates in requires close-air support. That mission is currently fulfilled by CF-18's. The A-29, or a similar plane, could provide superior CAS capability for far less money. Then, as an added bonus, the successor to the CF-18 would not need to be compromised for CAS, as the F-35 is. Canada could look for a pure air-superiority fighter, and buy a smaller number of them because they would not be called upon to perform CAS. The end result would be an air force that's better at it's primary roles and far cheaper, and Canadian forces (and their allies) on the ground would be far safer.
I'm totally with you. The CF-18 is pretty good for Arctic sovereignty and for maintaining our NORAD commitments, but absolutely terrible for peacekeeping & observation missions. Same goes for coast guard missions. The F-35 seems like it would just be bad at all of them. Would you want to fly a sortie north of the Arctic circle in a single engine jet?!
In your opinion what makes it terrible for peacekeeping & observation? Isn't it just a matter of Canada not buying and integrating suitable armament? With Jdams and Paveways you have to go too close for early operations, but Canada still dropped 10% of bombs in Libya according to wikipedia. Sweden has a similar setup, missing proper ranged options but they were restricted to doing strictly recon in Libya. In the end I suspect that even if you had the ability, no-one besides USA(/UK/France/Germany) has the stockpiles/willingness to start throwing around cruise missiles in foreign ops. For smaller countries there's political reasoning behind doing enough but not everything you possibly could in foreign ops.
Not all modern fighters have started as a multi-role, but every good fighter has ended up as one.
If I'm remembering properly, my grandfather was stationed in Yemen in '63-'64 as an aircraft field mechanic. Their mission was purely observational: every 12 hours, fly over the border and count any accumulation of military equipment. I believe they had a DHC-3 Twin Otter.
I don't know the specifics, but looking at the specifications: 945 mile range, 121 mph cruise speed on the DHC-3. That's give or take a 6-7 hour loiter (they were landing in the desert and had fuel trucks come daily). It's harder to get exact specs on how a CF-18 would perform on such a mission, but I've got a pretty good feeling it's not going to be landing on any gravel airstrips, nor is it going to be fun trying to count vehicles on the ground.
When I think of peacekeeping missions, I think of boots on the ground, ideally with air support. Looking at the A-29 from the article, that sounds a lot more like the type of aircraft that should be providing that support.
The blue on blue in Afghanistan mentioned in the first para was caused by the GPS resetting its self (to the current location) when the batteries where changed.
Which is why the SF team unfortunately called the strike on them selves - this happened a couple of times I belive.
My biggest concern about F-35's is how quickly they can be made in wartime situations. They have so many sophisticated instruments... can they really be mass produced? In WW2, Germany had the best tanks, but the Soviets and the Americans overwhelmed them with numbers. You can say that WW2 is an old war, but if you're wrong do we really have a reliable plane that we can mass produce anymore?
In modern, high-intensity warfare, you fight with what you have. The days of producing a Liberty ship a day are way past our industrial capability, and the technology in the F-35 and fighters of its caliber limit the ability to mass produce in anything close to WW2 quantities.
You could say that about the initial stage of the war, but can you maintain an occupying force for years against a sophisticated country? In that case, we would eventually run out of F-35's due to sabotage or maintenance issues.
This idea that the only thing that matters is what you already have creates a race - can you crush resistance before those who are resisting realize that you have limited long-term capability?
The weapons used in an occupation are vastly different than what you use to initially defeat an opponent. Most occupations are faced with insurgencies equipped with small arms, not 5th generation aircraft.
In Iraq, we had time to spool up production of MRAPs to counter IEDs, and were pretty quick to deploy equipment that would aid in COIN warfare.
But MRAPs would be shit in a real war against a peer grade opponent; too heavy, too slow, confined to roads, poor overall performance.
that germany had the best tanks is a bit inaccurate. The t-34 was better than almost everything else out there when it came out. easily outclassing common german tanks. the improved models could compete with the tiger and panthers (though there were few of these)
though the big issues with the tiger and panther was the horrible maintenance issues.
A terrible article entirely predicated on anecdotal evidence. I have no doubt that most of the 'technologically advanced' equipment Americans put into and will put into wars will ultimately fail to live up to expectations.
But let's give another anecdote about the A10. In Iraq, the A10, just like the B52 in Afghanistan, was responsible for killing two truck loads of British soldiers. Its pilot mistook the luminous arrow signs that indicated friendly forces for missile systems.
In Afghanistan, an American Apache mowed down a platoon of British troops after being called in as air support and mistaking the troops for the enemy.
The thing that links all these incidences is not low or high tech but the American military. Clearly its pilots, soldiers, staff are not trained properly. Just a bunch of reckless idiots. Much like the government that sent them.
> Clearly its pilots, soldiers, staff are not trained properly. Just a bunch of reckless idiots. Much like the government that sent them.
And this is not "entirely predicated on anecdotal evidence"? You've described two incidents, and extrapolated from there to call an entire military (in this case, more than 2 million people) improperly trained "reckless idiots."
The incidents are serious. But without any attempt to qualify the rate of these accidents relative to the number of engagements, or a comparison to other militaries in other conflicts around the world, it sounds like you're just riding an axe.
> * The thing that links all these incidences is not low or high tech but the American military. Clearly its pilots, soldiers, staff are not trained properly.
No, the thing that links them all is war - it's incredibly messy and people have been killing the wrong people in wars for as long as men have been fighting.
Whilst you are correct, and every conflict has blue on blue engagements, the US military have a very bad reputation for being bloody dangerous to their allies.
Mission videos that do emerge of incidents where US aircraft, helicopters and drones end up engaging friendly or non-hostile targets commonly show a marked desire to engage the enemy and view any and all information coming in as confirming that initial prejudice.
I'm not saying this applies to all US military personnel or that other militaries do not have problems.
I honestly believe this is largely the result of the U.S. performing the vast majority of sorties flown.
Deploying air forces in an expeditionary capability is difficult and expensive. It's much more difficult than deploying a ground unit. Few forces have this capability.
When you're in Afghanistan, and 90% of the CAS sorties are performed by the U.S., then it stands to reason that if an incident occurs, it'll likely have been a U.S. aircraft based on odds alone.
I suspect you're correct. Issue is, from what I read, it would perhaps be better if most of those sorties were never flown. It seems that use of air power will tend to prioritise the lives of soldiers over civilians. ('Blue on blue' not withstanding, but then my point above was not really about that, but about the anecdotal nature of much of the conversation.)
If I'm reading you correctly and I take this to it's logical conclusion, one could correctly assume that in any war, regardless of the precautions, technology, and training, you will have civilian deaths. You'll have terrible incidents where friendly forced were shot at, or buildings misidentified and a family of four blown up.
It's probably drifting out of scope of this conversation, but it can probably never be reemphasized enough that these will be the consequences of any war, and as such, a war should never be seen as a favorable outcome. In that, I definitely agree with you.
>> In Afghanistan, an American Apache mowed down a platoon of British troops after being called in as air support and mistaking the troops for the enemy.
Do you have a link for this?
Here's a list I found that doesn't seem to mention w whole platoon getting killed:
I can certainly buy the narrative that the military is spending too much money or designing weapons for the 'last war'. Yet I have a nagging suspicion that this is like the business users complaining that IT won't just buy everyone $200 laptops to save money. Devil's advocate: what could the Airforce's rationale be? I hate to write off the professionals so quickly.
If you need a turboprop attack plane to deal with a specific threat, you can fast track something cheaply because it's a widely known/used technology. The converse isn't true. You can't go back and decide you need a top tier $trillion fighter in a month.
Loiter time is important. Yet most military engagements in history are decided by speed and firepower.
The problem is that all the employees are just playing minesweeper, a $3k macbook pro running windows in a VM is the wrong tool for the job. $200 notebooks are perfect.
You have to give the guys the right tool for the job. The guys are telling you that the F-35 is the wrong tool for the job. "Yes, keep using that drill to install those nails because otherwise the taxpayers will have our asses."
This is the equivalent to saying that a cigarette boat could get a couple shots off in a fight with a battleship because of it's maneuverability and speed.
Well yes that may be true.
However, it's more likely a battleship would sink a cigarette boat with a precision guided weapon a second after it becomes visible on the horizon.
ahhh, but put a little effort into building the cigarette boat and the response envelope is drastically small, small enough that a swarm of cheap boats could gut a battleship.
I would too, except that the article tries very hard to not mention "Embraer". Instead, it lists the manufacturer as being "Sierra Nevada Corporation".
My working assumption is that military procurement has everything to do with which contractors need to get paid and very little to do with military objectives, since we don't actually have any achievable military objectives.
WW2 era? What a load of rubbish, just because it has a propellor. The basic Tucano first flew in 1980.
By the same yardstick I assume Vice thinks a helicopter is da Vinci era?
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The turboprop ( geared propellor driven by a jet engine ) is still the most efficient means of aviation propulsion devised; it surpassed internal-combustion engines in efficiency in the early 1960s, with the Turboméca Astazou, and continued to improve.
Turboprops fall-off in efficiency with altitude and speed, but below around 20,000 ft and 400 kts they're the champions.
Typically in the news process the copyeditor chooses or edits the title of the piece for brevity and "punch."
By saying "WWII-era," the title very succinctly sums up the idea that "hey, there's this interesting airplane that's been in the works alongside the very expensive F-35, but it's actually much cheaper and much less technologically advanced, but actually much better suited for the war in Afghanistan--and it resembles the types of fighter planes that you've seen in 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Saving Private Ryan'."
The title is meant to convey as much information to the audience (a general, non-technical audience) in as few words as possible, and it mostly does its job.
If you read the article, it's clear that the authors understand the difference.
Headlines have been written to grab your immediate attention and want to read further since newspapers have been in print. If that makes it "clickbait", its usually only clickbait when the headline over promises or leads with some climatic note and under delivers, like "That one weird trick to losing weight" turns out its called limiting calorie consumption and exercise or "A guy was walking down the street, you won't believe what happens next", which turns out I do and what happens is only mildly interesting or the buzzfeed "12 things on a list of things on how to do something, 11 of which you already know about and the 12th not being very effective"
The editor was trying to convey as much info within the given length as they could. They didn't realize that it would result in a title that was also clickbait. Remember, never blame malice where stupidity will suffice.
(P.S. Of course it was click bait and purposefully done so, there is an art to creating clickbait headlines that can be defended as not being clickbait.)
Direct line of communication. But they could still be lying, so I guess I should say it was a guess.
Actually, I got a psychic to get me direct access to their brain, so I'm sure they aren't lying. But they could be incorrectly remembering it. So we still can't be certain. For it to be 100% not a guess, I'm going to need to get go back in time with my time machine and have the psychic come with me, but he is saying something about how that could cause problems.
So sadly we are stuck just inferring (guessing) with the information given.
> By saying "WWII-era," the title very succinctly sums up the idea that "hey, there's this interesting airplane that's been in the works alongside the very expensive F-35, but it's actually much cheaper and much less technologically advanced, but actually much better suited for the war in Afghanistan--and it resembles the types of fighter planes that you've seen in 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Saving Private Ryan'."
Yes but its inaccurate. Cold war era would get the point across just fine.
I don't think "Cold war era" would get the point across. To me, "Cold war" is associated with expensive high-tech planes like the SR-71 and the B-2. I think most people would think of planes like these when you say "Cold war era".
To say that the plane is "WWII era" when it is not, is simply incorrect. I don't understand how it would be considered acceptable practice to state something that is misleading and untrue for effect. If it is a clear exaggeration then maybe you could argue hyperbole, but I think that this is just a poorly-researched article.
It's obviously mostly a linkbait title, but to be fair to it it's a reference to most WWII planes using propellers, as opposed to the jet planes of today. They're not claiming the Tucano was literally designed in the 40s.
While this plane oviously isn't WW2 era, the glass cockpit says nothing. There are plenty J3 cubs, planes WW2 pilots learned to fly on, still out there today... and many of them have glass cockpits w/ gps and all the goodies. Airframes last a logn time when taken care of, and swapping panels is trivial...
For close-air-support (which the Air Force really doesn't want to be involved in...), the most effective aircraft have often been cheap, slow, unsexy aircraft that can carry a lot of ordinance, take a lot of punishment, and get down low and slow to hit ground targets with bullets. See the Ju-87 Stuka, IL-2 Sturmovik, Douglas A-1 Skyraider, AC-47 and AC-130 gunships, and the A-10.
- The A-10's survivability is overrated. The Air Force conducted studies after both Gulf Wars and found that the A-10 was taking higher damage per sortie when compared in '91 to '03. That Iraq's air defense was in shambles didn't seem to diminish the fact that the A-10 was becoming more vulnerable to more sophisticated weapons. Technology has made cheaper weapons more effective since the 1970s in which this was designed. In a higher threat environment, the lack of sophisticated sensors, threat identification, and ECM is seen as not boding well.
- The A-29 is a fantastic plane. But it's giving the A-10 a run for it's money, not the F-35. In the low-threat COIN environment, it has all of the benefits of the A-10 with none of the drawbacks. That famous cannon isn't always idea against militants in the mountains when you're worried about spraying your own troops. That the A-19 can carry small guided weapons just like the A-10 gives it capabilities where it counts. And it's half to a third of the price to purchase and maintain.
So the A-10 is getting squashed from two sides: The F-35 can penetrate the high-threat environment, and provide CAS in a lethal SAM environment, while the A-29 can provide CAS/COIN against militants in a low to non-existent threat environment. There is no middle ground. It left when air defense systems gained the sophisticated tracking and accuracy that wasn't there in the 1970s and 80s.
The A-10 was a fantastic plane and well designed for the time in which it was envisioned to fight. But even I agree that it's time has passed. Like the F-14, it's sad to see it go, but I think it's the right call.