Nope, not buying it. You’re talking about a specific situation where a pilot in an A-10 is directly overhead a developing situation. How did he get to be there? How does he know to look at the truck that needs to catch a bomb? The same reasons would allow a drone pilot to look at the scene and he would be able to make the same instinctive decisions the A-10 pilot would. The drone just has the added option of staying up longer, having a (optionally)wider field of view, being able to provide multiple inputs if the situation calls for it. I’m sure there are applications for which the drone is inferior, but it doesn’t seem plausible that situational awareness of what’s happening on the ground is one of them. Possible, but not plausible.
You have a total lack of perspective which is leading you to a poor conclusion. The $1.5 trillion figure is then-year dollars, which means inflation is built into that number. How much are we going to spend on defense during the next half century? In other words, $1.5 trillion is how much of total defense spending during that time?
I just did some quick calculations. Assuming 2% inflation and if the defense budget were to drop to $440 billion (from the roughly $490 billion it is today), defense spending would be close to $40 trillion dollars over that period. Yes, building AND OPERATING the largest fighter fleet will cost a lot of money over that time, but it is expected that one out of every 40 dollars spend on defense will be for tacair. Is spending 1/40th of the defense budget on tactical air sound “absurdly expensive” to you?
Why don’t you do your own research? I look forward to your results. And I suggest that you compare the life cycle cost of the F-16 to the life cycle cost of what it replaced – do you think the F-16 was cheaper than the F-4 and related aircraft?
Are you arguing that defense programs should not be curtailed before the learning curve and economies of scale can reduce production costs to better justify the sunk costs of developing a weapons system?
One question for you: in your view, how does the cost of the F-22 compare to the F-35?
That’s what CAS is. Planes hovering around a combat operation in progress (or around a given ground unit), without any specific or pre-planned mission or target, in case the ground troops in question need a hand in a hurry.
Typically I’d say from communications with ground troops, or just observing the truck driver’s reaction to a military plane buzzing overhead. “Anyone who runs is a V.C.”, that sort of thing 
The drone has several limitations there : first, since the operators are usually stateside, there’s lag in the comms and controls of the drone, and with the video feedback. Even moreso since they were forced to add encryption to the signal (early in the wars, drone broadcasts were 100% unsecured, just to speed this up. And because nobody expected insurgents to both figure it out, and take advantage of it. So of course they did).
Second, a pilot can see colours*.* A high altitude drone perforce sees the world through an IR camera, so B/W only. I could see situations where that might be a problem, e.g. “they got away in a blue truck !”.
Third, it’s easier to establish comms with a bird flying overhead than with a bunch of dudes in Nevada. I recall reading an article penned by a former drone operator who still has to deal with PTSD from just such an issue : he could see telltale signs of an IED on a road, but either there was a mechanical failure or the insurgents were jamming the comms (I can’t remember), so he couldn’t tell a HMMWV convoy to stop. And so he had to impotently watch as a couple of vehicles blew up, without survivors. In that situation, an airplane pilot would have had other options, even without any way to communicate directly, be it loosing a few cannon rounds as a warning or to try and detonate the IED prematurely, or giving wing signals. A drone hovering at 60.000 feet can’t do any of that that.
Finally, you were just talking about a team of people analyzing the data from the drone. Committees don’t make instinctive snap decisions, sort of by definition.
shrug The A-10 guys cited say their sitch awareness is better than drone operators or high altitude heavy-duty bombers and provides actual, documented real world examples. That’s good enough for “plausible” to me ;).
Any aircraft design will be superb if you design it to do one thing and one thing only. The problem is that the A-10 does everything else poorly.
Sprey is a smart guy with very fixed views, and one of those views is that multirole aircraft can never be as effective as those which are designed for a single purpose. He’s been arguing that the F-35 program is destined to become a turkey pretty much since the requirements stage. That’s why the F-16 was designed solely for air combat (and just happens to be a decent attack aircraft when fitted for the role.) That’s why the A-10 is so monumentally useless for anything other than flying slowly and shooting more-or-less stationary targets.
None of this makes any sense. Drones can already do basically everything the A-10 can (except carry a really huge gun), without needing to carry 10 tons of armor. I think the F-35’s close air support role is kind of pointless, but at least it can do other things.
This is a nitpick, sorta, but factually incorrect. Predators and the like are NOT IR only, they can switch from a daytime electro-optical sensor that includes colors to IR with the flip of a switch. Of course, they are limited to IR at night. I could see situations where that might be a problem, e.g. “they got away in a blue truck !”. (Other, smaller UAVs, like the Scan Eagle, cannot switch between EO and IR, because they can only carry one camera at a time.)
Well, yes. But that’s also what’s special about the design, and why it’s better than any other at *this *one thing. There are other planes to do the other things.
That’s true in just about any domain.
Multirole aircraft are certainly more economical. But, as with everything, you get what you pay for. Probably less than that in the specific case of the F-35 :).
That gun is kind of central to what the A-10 does, though.
Or when they’re flying at high altitudes and above cloud cover, no ?
Which would seem necessary to “cover square miles of activity”, in the words of Magiver (well, the altitude is - the cloud issue being a common byproduct of that)
The gun is central to what the A-10 is supposed to do: destroy tanks. There are no tanks in the wars we are fighting now, and you couldn’t send an A-10 to any of the countries where tanks might be used. The A-10 was designed to kill Russian tanks invading Western Europe, where it wouldn’t have to worry about enemy air defenses.
These IR cameras cannot see through clouds. Most larger UAVs have the capability to carry a synthetic aperture radar which can see through bad weather, but at resolutions that typically allow you to distingush and follow a moving truck or tank, not individual people. And the Predator type of UAV typically operates around 20,000 feet, which is a medium altitude, not high.
The wide area sensors Magiver referenced are completely different animals than the turret mounted camera you see all the time on pictures of Predators. There are very few of them around, and they are operated in a completely different way. Like I said, there aren’t 100 imagery analysts looking at a wide area feed 24/7. It’s more like the wide area feed is used forensically, to rewind the action and see where a car came from or something like that.
Without getting into the merits of the F-35 itself, you really have to remember that when it comes to aircraft at this level, the time window for implementation is decades, and the lifespan of the system is decades after that.
Work on the F-35 started in 1996. It’s going to be almost 20 years from the start of its real design work before it’s operational. It has a 50 year projected lifespan. So it’s crazy to object to it because America doesn’t currently face the threats it’s designed to counter. The real question is, 'What kind of threats might face in the next 50 years?" And the answer to that is, “No one knows.” Think back to what the world looked like 50 years before WWI, and ask yourself if you could have predicted the combatants in that war and the challenges they would face. You can do the same for any other war and find them equally difficult to answer. The world changes.
So what do you do? You plan an aircraft that’s better than everyone else’s, so hopefully you can counter anything anyone might throw at you four decades from now. And when weapons systems take two decades to develop, you simply can’t wait for the threats to appear and then try to build the systems to counter them.
I love the A-10. I thought the attempt to mothball it in 1991 was ridiculous. But I can also recognize its limitations. It’s unfair to other aircraft to deem the A-10 superior because of its success in Iraq - that was an environment absolutely tailor-made for the A-10. It played to all its strengths and none of its weaknesses. Had the U.S. still had the Douglas Skyraider, it probably could have done the job too in that environment, and it’s a WWII era aircraft. In fact, I remember one of the proposals for a new close air support weapon back around 1990 was a modernized variant of the Skyraider.
To me, the only way to be assured of having a competitive fighter in the future is to look at the best fighters other major powers are building, and make sure the one you are building is competitive against them - even if they are currently allies or if war against them seems unthinkable today. Things change.
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The gun is central to what the A-10 is supposed to do: destroy tanks. There are no tanks in the wars we are fighting now, and you couldn’t send an A-10 to any of the countries where tanks might be used. The A-10 was designed to kill Russian tanks invading Western Europe, where it wouldn’t have to worry about enemy air defenses.
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Eh, tanks, trucks, buildings… I mean, yes, OK that gun is massive overkill at this point. Which also means you *know *it’s going to be enough gun for any mission.
But getting close enough to use it in the first place also happens to let one differentiate between, say, a troop build up and a wedding party. Drones seem to have a poor track record with that ;).
And because everything about the A-10 is designed around getting to use that gun against Russian tanks in skies saturated with Shilka fire and criss-crossed with SA-7 contrails, that overcompensating penis extension is also what lets it get close enough, low enough, slow enough to make that distinction without overly endangering itself.
IOW, the good thing about that weapon system is specifically that it’s not stand-off nor “fire and forget”, which seems to turn into “fire and regret” slightly too often.
OK then, ignorance fought. Thanks !
All you are doing here is shucking and dodging. My perspective is perfectly fine, as are my conclusions. $681 million per plane is $681 million dollars per plane, no matter how you try to cut it; and yes that is obscenely expensive. It isn’t exactly secret knowledge that the F-35 program has suffered from extreme cost overruns and delays. Accusing others of lacking prospective (myself) or not having their facts straight (Try2B Comprehensive) when they have them straight is rather silly when the blunt fact is the F-35 passed the half-billion per plane projected program cost long ago. It’s also rather ironic given your earlier insistence that the A-10 has never faced an IADS, which you then clarified to mean ‘since 2003’ which if true means you were aware of the fact that the A-10 faced an IADS in 1991 in what was by far its heaviest operational combat use but chose to ignore that inconvenient fact which put your statement to lie.
Sure, here are some quick numbers for you: the fly-away cost of an F-16C was US$18.8 million in 1998. The fly-away cost of an F-35C was US$199.4M in 2013. Now what does your claim that the F-35 is only 10-20% more expensive per flight hour have to do with the price of tea in China? The fly-away cost of the F-35 is still more than 10 times that of the F-16, and the projected lifetime cost of the F-35 bumps that cost per plane from just under $200 million all the way up to $681 million per plane. Oh, and that’s with the economy of scale of producing 2,200 units.
Are you kidding? The point, which you seem to have missed, is that this $1.5 trillion cost assumes that there will be no further unforeseen expenses over the next 50 years of the F-35 program. Given the history of obscene cost overruns that have already occurred in the program and that it hasn’t even reached Initial Operational Capability despite the first flight having occurred in 2006, that’s hardly a safe bet.
The ARGUS-IS system in question will track 36 square miles of surface area at a time. I don’t know if they’re already in the predator’s or not but I would assume the CIA would get them first before anyone else so their will be gap in knowing when that occurs. It was suppose to be deployed already in Afghanistan on a Hummingbird but that got cancelled. What is scary about the system is that it was a small budget project using off the shelf 5 MP cell phone cameras. That will assuredly get bumped up in time to an array of already off the shelf camera chips of 20 megapixels or better.
Over 50 years. With inflation. And we can afford it, as I’ve explained. Plus there is no cheaper alternative to the F-35 with anywhere near the same capabilities.
Wait, I’m getting confused by this IADS argument. Are modern IADS irrelevant because the A-10 actually flew against an active one in 1991, or are they irrelevant because we expect to do a month’s worth of bombing before the A-10s can patrol the highway of death?
Did you intentionally compare the cost of an F-16 which had been in production for 22 years and several thousand built, with the cost of a carrier-based aircraft that has been in production for four years and only 14 have been built? Of course the F-35 is more expensive, but you’re comparing numbers for very different aircraft at very different stages of maturity. It’s not a good comparison.
Plus, you completely ignored what I asked you for: life cycle cost, not flyaway cost. Flag away cost is almost meaningless because it fails to include support equipment, training equipment, maintenance equipment, initial spares, and oh yeah - operation and maintenance cost, which alone is two-thirds the actual cost of a jet.
Name three weapons systems that had significant cost increases after a mature production line was established.
I can’t. Virtually all cost growth in a weapons system is attributable to development costs, changes in requirements which defer development costs to out years, or reduction of quantities which result in loss of economic order quantities.