Blackhawk
Well-Known Member
I agree 100%.
My issue is with the Air Force at the higher level determining what airframes will be available in that tool box for the grunts in the fight.
A-10 vs B1
- Thread starter gliderboy
- Start date
My issue is with the Air Force at the higher level determining what airframes will be available in that tool box for the grunts in the fight.
Agree with you. That's part of the problem with regards to the $$$ and funding. Congress has told the Air Force "you must make cuts!" So, the AF comes back with programs and things they want to cut, and are told "No, you can't cut those!" That's where the AF came up with whole-fleet eliminations, rather than just numbers reductions within fleets. If congress is going to tell the AF to cut, then they need to go along with what the AF wants to cut, and not prevent them from doing so for purely political and jobs reasons (reserves/guard), under the guise of supporting the troops.
Lawman
Well-Known Member
They could let us have a damn BRAC without congressional influence if they were serious about saving money.
The people in Congress screaming about retiring this aircraft or that aircraft are doing it because it hits their district. Nobody in Congress is qualified to speak on the strategic or tactical benefit of one platform vs the other. If we were talking about retiring 135s you would hear the same bitching from different seats.
*The Congressman from Ohio has the floor*
"The Air Force isnt serious about its strategic mission... It just wants a bunch of cool fighter jets instead of maintaining its ability to protect the US...."
The people in Congress screaming about retiring this aircraft or that aircraft are doing it because it hits their district. Nobody in Congress is qualified to speak on the strategic or tactical benefit of one platform vs the other. If we were talking about retiring 135s you would hear the same bitching from different seats.
*The Congressman from Ohio has the floor*
"The Air Force isnt serious about its strategic mission... It just wants a bunch of cool fighter jets instead of maintaining its ability to protect the US...."
hook_dupin
Well-Known Member
Something the Army hasn't thought about much: what if air superiority isn't a given?
The last time a US ground unit faced enemy aerial attack was in 1952. I'm worried that without the right investments in achieving air dominance (you know....those "F" programs), that the assumption of air superiority may go away against a neer-peer foe.
How we then later provide CAS becomes a secondary problem.
Blackhawk
Well-Known Member
On the flip side the military plays a game with the Guard/Reserve. In many instances (such as aviation), the Guard/Reserve can be a very cost effective part of the military. You get VERY experienced service members and their equipment at a fraction of the cost. I'm sure you have seen it- when an active duty unit fell in to replace us they were amazed at how effective we were at our missions. Of course- we had very few personnel with less than 10 years experience. We even had pilots and enlisted who served in Viet Nam.
In addition, after Viet Nam General Abrams (Army COS), came up with an ingenious solution to the Army fighting a future war without popular support. He reorganized the Army in such a way that it could not fight a sustained war (such as Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq), without a serious commitment from the Guard/Reserve. The idea was that elected officials would have to justify their support for such wars from the get go and involve the entire population instead of getting into a protracted war "back door".
Unfortunately with the current cuts the Army is attempting to undo this.
Blackhawk
Well-Known Member
But air superiority is not the only Air Force mission, though they like to think it is. Why else would the F-117 have an "F" designation. MikeD, you flew it. How good a fighter WAS the F-117? I'm going to take a wild guess and say... not very good.
The Army does consider it. But, war being what it is, we need balance. We need airlift. That yucky "C" thingy the Air Force begrudgingly does (while charging us for it). We need bombers. And... yes... although the Air Force hates it. We need CAS.
BTW, I've been to Air Force schools such as AGOS. How many Army schools have you been to?
We do need a BRAC, indeed. And I agree about the political wrangling over equipment and airframes, concealed as a "protecting the troops" thing.
And the last actual aerial attack (in combat) against our forces of any kind, was in 1972 with VPAF MiG-17s attacking the USS Higbee off of Haiphong. I'm with you in the assumption of air superiority we seemingly get comfortable with these days......something that may bite us in the future.
Blackhawk
Well-Known Member
Unfortunately the military- especially the Air Force- is pretty good at playing politicians to get what they want. Read my post in the military section on the Air Force playing the Army like a six string guitar in the C-27 fiasco. The military will often offer to cut a project KNOWING that someone in congress won't let that particular project get cancelled.
Blackhawk
Well-Known Member
Let me ask the Air Force types here who advocate for killing the A-10 and giving the mission to other airframes.
Every hear of John Boyd? Read about the development of the F-16? F-15? He advocated for a dedicated attack aircraft as he knew when that when you tried to make an airframe do too much you turned a horse into a camel. You got an airframe that could NOT win air superiority and was a poor attack aircraft.
Every hear of John Boyd? Read about the development of the F-16? F-15? He advocated for a dedicated attack aircraft as he knew when that when you tried to make an airframe do too much you turned a horse into a camel. You got an airframe that could NOT win air superiority and was a poor attack aircraft.
The guard and reserve, while everything you write here I agree with; they're also one of the biggest scams I've seen from my time in the Guard as both enlisted as well as officer. Nepotism from hell in many cases, guys taking command not because they're even remotely competent, but because its "their turn" to do so. Some units were like a big jobs program....days and dollars was all it was about. Like anything else, there were good units and there were lousy ones.
The AF should shat-can the CAS mission. Give it to the Army like the USMC does, and let them do it. Let the AF do air superiority, nukes, space, heavy transport, etc. Modify the Key West agreement to make it so.
The F-117 had one air-to-air mission in its inception, that of carrying two AIM-9s and going after enemy Mainstay planes or other AWACS or HVTs. it was never used for that, but the AIM-9 connections are still in the bomb bay.
The F designation for the 117 was merely a throw-off to cover its real purpose.
TOTALLY agree on the C-27 fiasco. The USAF should've stayed the hell out of it. I can't tell you how many C-130s I saw in Iraq doing the round-robin ass and trash flights around the country, where I'd hop on to go someplace, and there's maybe 200 lbs of cargo besides myself on the bird. Complete and total waste of an asset.
I see no reason why the Army can't do their own intra-theatre airlift. Leave the strategic and some of the tactical airlift of bigger items to the USAF; but the Army should still be able to run it's own small aircraft. The AF had zero business screwing that one up.
If it was up to me, as I said before, I'm of the camp of giving the CAS mission to the Army, as well as the assets to do it like the A-10. What the Army ends up doing with the A-10 and how they end up doing it, will be their problem and no longer the AFs.
Blackhawk
Well-Known Member
Unfortunately won't happen. IF the Air Force gave the A-10 to the Army it would:
1. Be without hardpoints or weapons.
2. Be minus the money to support it- which the Air Force would keep, of course.
Essentially it would be a turbofan version of the OV-1 Mohawk. Another attack aircraft the Air Force defanged.
Blackhawk
Well-Known Member
Yeah, politics can be a major issue in the Guard. Of course active duty can be that way as well.
Was the "F" designation to throw off the Soviets or the Air Force brass?
Hacker15e
Who am I? Where are my pants?
It was actually part of a more complicated set of dummy designations that were being used for black programs at both TTR and the other operating location, including the Red Hat and Red Eagle Soviet aircraft (Google YF-113G and there's lots of great reading to be had on that topic).
If you have any familiarity with unacknowledged black programs, you'll know that the cover stories and designations are just as often random as they are well thought out disinformation. They are designed to protect the real information from *all* parties who don't need to know, both inside US borders and out, civilian and military, government worker and citizen.
hook_dupin
Well-Known Member
Yep... We certainly need CAS, but I think it's a much easier problem than the anti-access problem is. This is why the B-1 stays and the A-10 goes. The B-1 has a role to play in the near-competitor fight, while the A-10 would just get slaughtered. It's a shame that we're having to cut capability in one mission area only to keep pace in another.
Additionally, CAS has changed. As both precision weapons and platforms have gotten smaller, there's been a growth in the number of platforms that can take a 9-line.
For the record, and after a decade of flying, I'm now deep within the bowels of the acquisition system. I would kill to go to an Army course at this point.
I'm with @MikeD on the scrapping of the Key West agreement. If another service wants to fund an air asset for CAS, tactical airlift, or whatever, then they ought to be able to do so. Without knowing offhand, it seems like this is how it's working in the ISR world. How many different turbo-prop or RPA ISR assets exist among all services?
Hacker15e
Who am I? Where are my pants?
While I'm pretty agnostic about who "owns" CAS both in terms of assets physically owned/operated and who has doctrinal jurisdiction of the airspace short of the FSCL, I'm still highly skeptical of the Army's ability to even remotely integrate into a contested air battlespace. With absolutely zero institutional knowledge on the subject, and I'm sure no interest in learning any of that "Air Force junk", it would be a tragic clown-show of titanic proportions if they had to learn such integration during an actual shooting war.
To change it, at this point in our mutual services' maturity in terms of established TTPs, would cause just as many problems as it would theoretically solve. Not that the grunts would care, because those would be problems out there in the sky and nowhere in their battlespace, and thus the issue would be "fixed".
Hacker15e
Who am I? Where are my pants?
Dude, I'm not sure where you get this idea that Institutional Air Force hates anything that is not Air Superiority. It is a popular spear for folks outside the organization to throw, but it is not based on any sort of reality that I'm aware of out of ANY set of senior leadership or doctrine in the 24 years I've been associated with the service. You have three USAF fighter guys in this very conversation, and yet none of us are advocating any of that, either.
Folks seem to amplify one specific fight of recent memory (ergo, the procurement of the Raptor) into something it wasn't, and forget all of the other efforts the service made during that same time period to procure new airlift, tankers, bombers, helos, and all sorts of other mission platforms that were also highly contested political and military-industrial complex circus acts. Those may have not have spent as much time on the front page of Army Times and AF Times, but only because the consumers of that media didn't care as much about them.
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Lawman
Well-Known Member
Agreed
It is hard enough to get the portion of the Army not related to Aviation to understand why Aviation has such a huge share of the budget (that would only expand with addition of Fixed Wing Attack).
We are a service run by bullet heads, that is Tankers and Infantry guys. The pinnacle division between good leaders and bad for vetting process is Ranger School... not a War College, not some joint billet, this is viewed as the ultimate in leadership when it is myopically focused on small unit tactics. Ive had a hard enough time trying to getting Aviation guys to buy off on the stop viewing the Air Force down your nose, they have tools we dont like a 3-1 and a far more refined set of TTPs for a contested fight. When is the last time you saw a SIPR level briefing in a Pilots Briefing... It never happens. Because Classified info is too hard so lets just study the lift equation or I am a drop of oil again... Ground leaders would just be clueless. You try explaining Joint Fires to those people and they just look at you stupid. You try explaining how SEAD is a locally produced support (IE ask your arty before you just assume the AF will take care of it) and they dont believe you, even when the doctrine flat out says so.
We should not be running a CAS program when we can barely get our junk in a sock for the first 30K past the FLOT. Now you want to start worrying about AI and integration into the Air Battle Plan? The guys at Nellis are gonna need to redo that Slide on how Joint Fires works....
As Hacker said, we will do more damage to ourselves with our own ignorance than with the Enemies actual ability.
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That's why I said the Key West Agreement would have to be scrapped, with the Army being able to operate armed fixed wing aircraft and given the CAS role for themselves........basically be given the whole thing on a silver platter, so the AF can wash its hands of it completely.
Kind of both with regards to the F designation, along with what Hacker wrote. And to be able to recruit fighter guys to be interested, as they were told nothing of it until they'd already signed on the dotted line.
I agree with the sentiment and what could conceivably happen. But that's just it.......once the mission and aircraft are given to the Army, who cares what they do with it, when it's being operated in their part of the sandbox. It's like if you sold a used car to someone, would you then care what they do with it once they've paid you for it? Nope. If they take great care of it, cool. If they screw it away and break it, fine. If they're treating an A-10 and CAS as ops short of the FSCL....much like arty.....and keeping it Army controlled, what do I care what they do with it or how they integrate? Give them a place to be and to operate.....much like helos on ATO.....and leave them to succeed in CAS, or to screw it away. Our hands are washed of it either way. If the Army operates it like an M-1 tank that happens to be at 100AGL, that's on them.
And in the areas they need to integrate, TRAIN them. Unless the Army Aviator really is a Neanderthal half-ass military pilot who is incapable of doing anything apart from VFR flight from A to B.