Drones, at least the Predator kind, are not ideally suited for CAS. There’s too much latency involved, both in “steering” and in comms with whoever you’re trying to CS from the A. There are smaller ones that can be launched and piloted by guys within the same zip code as the troops they’re supporting ; but those don’t pack quite the same oomph - certainly they could never drag the A-10s anti-dinosaur gun.
Drones can also be hijacked (Iran claims to have done this, though anybody with a central cortex have their doubts) and piggybacked onto (Afghani & Iraqi insurgents most definitely have done this). In any event, they’re relatively easy to shoot down. So they’re not a reliable 100% substitute.
BTW, tactile bombing ? I knew iPads could be repurposed for many things but…
But for the last 60 years we’ve been the world’s policeman. And the despots of the world prefer to buy decent military equipment so we’ve had to keep up with the joneses.
“Drone” does not mean “Predator type” - if they keep enlarging them, they will eventually discover the possibility of using them for close air support.
Then somebody will come up with a pack mule drone which can carry a folding aircraft drone with a capacity of a few thousand rounds.
Then every squad gets one with a certified geek to control it.
At this point, the A-10 starts to look old.
And is it amazing that, of all possible word associations for “tactile”, someone would say “iPad”.
I’m not sure I like where this generation’s love of gadgets is going…
The 35 is in production right now and will be the secondary aircraft for the air force within a number of years. Even if the AF were to re-open the fairchild lines, if the tooling still exists, and do we want to update it with something else besides that big honkin 30mm, it would probably not roll off the assembly lines short of ten years, in a peace time environment.
The hog is a sweet plane, but it can’t kick in the door, has minimal self defense capability, needs top cover in a contested battle space, and can’t get out of dodge fast enough, should things get pear shaped. What it does, it does very well. But its only been deployed when we had the advantage of picking the time and place.
Refight WW2, and we can come up with an analog of the hog, or the spad (A1), till then the F35 is our dancing partner.
A lot of people have made interesting comments that I’ll respond to when I’m not on my phone, but one question here: is this Sprey’s judgment that the A-10 is the most useful weapon it has? Was this a recent observation or based on his studies in the late '60s (which lead to the development of the A-10)?
The reason I ask is because the A-10 is Sprey’s (and others’) brainchild. While there are certainly facts that show the A-10 is very effective, I think we should take comments that “x” is the best thing ever if those statements come from the person who invented “x.” Like, if you ask Lockheed, I’m sure they will tell you that the F-22 and F-35 are the two best planes in existence. That is a judgment with some foundation, but let’s consider the source, too.
Theoretically yes, but my article claims the A-10 is being killed next year:
The author has his theory why (note that I don’t have it in for the Air Force personally, I’m just quoting this guy with the persuasive article):
I think it is that the A-10 has provided the best military outcomes of the Air Force’s history in the opinion of my author, while Sprey and co. designed it to be the best plane for the Air Force’s most useful application. I suppose you could look at the data in different ways to suggest other results- the author suggests that maximum utility was a fad to keep programs alive in competition against the other branches of the military at that time, while motives today are different.
There’s another quote from my article about Sprey’s return to defend the A-10 from the above-described fate:
He’s talking about betrayal of fighting men because he expects worse outcomes with the A-10 replaced altogether by the F-35. The article I’m citing stresses repeatedly the great situational awareness an A-10 pilot can have since he is personally looking out of his window at the ground. Meanwhile, drone video is poor, F-35 and B-1 digital video are delayed and those planes are far away anyway, too far away to be sure if they are bombing a military target or an ordinary farm inhabited by 20 civilians.
Not to beat a dead horse, but this rationale is starting to be stranger and stranger. While sometimes there is no substitute for the Mk1 eyeball, I’m just struggling to see how the naked eye is viewed as so superior to an HD video camera that allows you to identify precise individuals from 6 miles away, such as the sensors being installed on Reapers; or how the eyeball is better in fog than the Lynx synthetic aperture radar also found on Reapers; or even the LITENING pods found on F-16s that are really 20 year old technology. It just seems really strange to compare a pilot’s eyes at 500’ AGL to sensors that are used from literally miles away. How is a 10 second glance at a target during a low pass better than any of those that can be used to similar effect from 20,000 feet? It just isn’t adding up to me unless its a case of someone claiming, “It isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.”
That video can give poor intelligence is one of the central theme’s of this author’s argument. Here’s one explanation:
There are a couple more blurbs on this subject in the article, but for now I have to go. The author also points out several examples where remote sensing led to the killing of civilians, sometimes in numbers in the 100’s. In one case an A-10 was on the scene telling TIC that the target was just a farm, ‘no joy’. They called in a B-1 to bomb those coordinates instead and… blew up a farm.
The new camera arrays aren’t soda straws. They cover square miles of activity and the software can mark and track every single thing that moves. This is exponentially beyond anything a pilot can take in.
Taken down to the level of a scud running plane it still offers the potential of looking everywhere at once and sending that information to a group of people who can watch everything at once. Again, exponentially more than what a single pilot can take in.
The thing about wide area sensors is that the primary use is forensic, essentially. You don’t expect to have 100 imagery analysts watching a live feed of ten square miles, looking for particular things in real time. Generally the sensors scoop up this huge amount of data so that when something happens (like if a bomb goes off), one can later rewind the footage, try to discern when the bomb was planted, and then rewind the tape to see where the perpetrators came from, or where they went next.
Well, there aren’t many more points I can dredge up from my cite. Ravenman, are you persuaded at all that procurement at the Air Force is not following an ideal path? Do you think the F-35 is worth $1.5 trillion for ~2200 planes? Right now? Do you think axing the entire A-10 program 25 years ahead of schedule to save $3.5 billion over a few years is worth it? Do you think the F-35 really replaces the A-10 at its mission? Do you doubt that CAS is perhaps the most useful contribution the Air Force can give in a conflict, and that the A-10 in many cases does the job better, not to mention far cheaper?
Do you think soaking up $1.5 trillion dollars worth of the budget right now, and killing the A-10 at the same time, is the best service the Air Force could provide to the American people as a whole?
But you also have more processing power to devote to the problem. Theoretically at least, multiple people can look at the scene, you can zoom in and out, spend much more time looking at something. I find it difficult to believe that a pilot/copilot looking out of a low flying plane can process more information and do it better than a remotely piloted drone.
More people and/or more data processing means slower reaction time, if only from the necessary communication.
It’s fine if the goal is to catch a given suspect sometime in the next 24 hours, not so cool when you have to decide whether that truck needs to catch a bomb within the next 5 seconds. Whereas the lawnmowing pilot(s) will simply make the decision instinctively, using information they might not even realize they’re picking up or processing.
And sure, they might be wrong half the time (though I wouldn’t dismiss a pilot’s instincts that casually). But the other half of the time, they’ll have made that decision fast enough to defuse a dangerous situation and maybe save people.
I think there’s a big difference between “ideal” and “justifiable given the budget situation.” The A-10 is ideal at CAS, but I think the days of having weapons dedicated to one narrow mission and doing it extremely well are coming to a close. A-10 is one among many systems that I would put in that category.
Yes, if the problems with the F-35 are worked out. Keep in mind that the $1.5 trillion figure refers to not only buying the jets but also operating them for the next 50-60 years. The F-35 flight hour cost appears to be somewhere around 10-20% more than an F-16, which for a strike aircraft that is so much more capable than the F-16 is a pretty damn good deal in my book.
Implicit in your statement is that $3.5 billion is a small amount of money. If not the A-10, something else needs to be cut. Congress won’t allow base closures. The Air Force is already a very small service, so they probably can’t cut people. The tanker and LRS-B are must-do programs. The idea of cutting F-35 procurement by about 20% to fund five years of A-10 operations doesn’t really seem like a good deal to me, because it pushes out modernization of the whole tacair fleet and keeps unit costs high. In a budgetary situation were the Air Force is looking at cutting 78 C-130s – whose utility is irreplaceable – I would be very reluctant to say that A-10s must be untouchable. I would think that a reasonable step would be substantially curtailing the fleet and moving the whole capability into the Reserves and Air Guard for the next few years until the F-35 and associated systems needed for CAS (like the Small Diameter Bomb, a JAGM-like weapon, etc) are actually ready for use.
No, not today. The F-35 is not operational. But combat troops are going to be gone from Afghanistan within months.
I have huge skepticism on how one can conclude that CAS is the “most useful contribution” of the Air Force. More so than GPS? More so than aerial resupply? More useful than satellite communications? Go ahead and tell the Army that those are going away and they’ll freak out. There’s several weapons systems that can do CAS adequately, the A-10 just does it better. There’s no replacement for GPS at all. There’s no useful replacement for a C-130. I have a hard time saying that there’s one most important role that the Air Force delivers in war.
As I said, get your facts straight. Most of us will be dead and buried before that $1.5 trillion is finally spent, because it’s going to take half a century to do so – so we’re not spending it “right now.”
That’s the problem in a nutshell right there. The Air Force brass has always hated the A-10, and the F-35 project, which was absurdly expensive to begin with, has become truly insanely expensive with cost overruns. So much money has already been sunk into the program that cancelling it isn’t a politically feasible option; it’s become too big to fail. That the A-10 performs the role of CAS better, cheaper, and much more effectively than the F-35 doesn’t matter.
Trying to minimize how absurdly expensive the F-35 program has become by noting that it will “take a half century to spend” and that the flight hour cost of the F-35 is only somewhere around 10-20% higher than the F-16 doesn’t cut it. The F-35 is atrociously expensive, full stop. That $1.5 trillion/2,200 planes is $681 million per plane, assuming no further unforeseen costs over the next 50 years. Pray tell, what was the lifetime cost of an F-16? I can assure you it’s a hell of a lot less than 80-90% of $681 million. The “no further unforeseen costs” part isn’t very likely to pan out either. Just take a look at the B-2 Spirit, which was ‘only’ supposed to have a fly-away price tag per plane of $500 million, a then unheard of sum. Since then program costs per plane have taken the price tag to $737 million per plane, total procurement costs per plane (spares, retrofitting, software upgrades, etc) to $929 million per plane, and the total program cost (the development, R&D, procurement, spares, etc., etc.) divided per plane comes out to $2.1 billion per aircraft.
