The Army recently announced they were standing up 6 Advise and Assist Brigades. Adivsors provide an opportunity to to leverage the skill and professionalism to help the security forces they adivse be better at handling their own threats. It still involves American troop on the ground and in harms way but far fewer of them and in a way that is supposed to leave more capability behind them.
The idea of creating these dedicated Brigades has been percolating for a long time (ISTR the idea being floated at the tail end of the Bush Admin and it gained a lot of traction under Obama.) Special Operations has performing the mission as one of their core competencies. When the need is large, like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan we’ve historically created ad-hoc units of advisors using conventional leaders. Obama aggressively pursued the use of SOCOM’s ability both increasing their size while deploying them heavily. Even with that the fight against IS in Iraq required creating more ad-hoc advise and assist units out of conventional forces. This is finally putting an organization together to meet the perceived ongoing need without having them be able to do everything else required to put on that long Special Forces tab.
In a lot of ways aggressive use of advisors is more Obama’s legacy than avoiding ground involvement. He deployed small elements to many places to advise. Bush had two big campaigns. Obama left US troops in harm’s way covering large swathes of Africa and the Middle East. Obama focused on SOCOM troops though. It was both easier to hide the early involvement and the American populace seems to care less if it’s not conventional forces. How this plays out in public perception when it’s conventional forces going to do exactly the same kind of things will be important. Will they be ignored like the SOCOM troops currently doing the job or will there be furor over “boots on the ground?” It’s hard to say.
I *think *there’s something in the Geneva Conventions prohibiting a war crime of *that *horrific a magnitude. If it turns out there isn’t, there oughta be.
At one time the forward deployment scenario was out but they have capability (not perfect) at a few locations nearer to theaters now.
If it’s only a 2-plane sortie (wow - shiney!) it doesn’t make sense to move aircraft, crew, maintainers, equipment forward. It’s actually much cheaper to fly over and back for the one or two time show. The maintenance ground crew would get stretched pretty thin if the 21 bombers were split up for too long and field conditions would not be optimum like in Mizzou.
Dead right on the “don’t show our cards to the Ruskies”. A shoot down would be too risky but intelligence gathering would be invaluable to the other guys.
The other name for “the rebels” is ISIS. Yeah, Assad doesn’t spend much time fighting ISIS which control large swathes of what is nominally Syria. And if Assad really did go down to defeat at the hands of the non-ISIS rebels, what happens next?
Half the rebels get subsumed into ISIS or whatever supranational Islamic terrorist organization is getting the most press by then. And the other half get killed by ISIS.
We’re fighting two sides of a three sided civil war, and one “side” we’re backing is the weakest and most fragile, mostly because it isn’t a unified side at all, since it’s a mishmash of dozens of Islamic militias ranging from “maybe we can get some weapons from America so ixnay on the eathday to America in public for now” to full-on Al Qaeda style “death to America”.
I’d argue that the Kurds represent a fourth side, and we’re not really fighting Assad, we just bombed one of his airbases, once. There don’t seem to be any plans, at present, to keep fighting him, and he doesn’t appear to have done anything to try to pick a fight with us either. So really we’re fighting one side in a four-sided civil war, actively helping two sides, and largely ignoring the fourth side.
Yes, but the OP was asking about “deploying large numbers of troops” or spending “huge sums.” Whatever the cost of the tanker operations for the B-2 may be, it’s certainly “cheap” on the spectrum of spending “huge sums” for a military action, and risks almost no lives.
Except they are seemingly not useful anywhere that has advanced Russian radar (which is exactly where we need them). The US doesn’t want to give Russia the chance to test their low band radars and see if they can get a lock or not (and gather other data of course at the same time). They can already detect them with low band radar, just not with enough precision to lock on, however that still useful as a warning so you can move vulnerable assets into more hardened places ( and switch on whatever systems you have to gather data on the radar signature of the B-2).
Some Navy admiral said a quote something like “You just can’t make 100,000 pounds of metal flying through the air spewing out hot gasses invisible”.
Against ISIS and other groups that have no air power at all, B-52’s are much cheaper and can react faster because they can be forward based. As I understand it the B-52’s can fly so high that most ground to air missiles can’t hit them. (I mean the shoulder mounted ones which are likely to end up in insurgents hands, not the truck based ones that shot down the Air Korea flight).
Shoulder fired missiles are generally good up to 10 or at very most 15,000 feet above the ground under optimal conditions. Any modern airplane can overfly them with impunity if they’re willing to avoid those low altitudes and they’re not dealing with missile emplacements atop the Himalayas. Whether the airplane can hit anything from way up there is a different question.
Recognizing also that high altitude is where the other SAMs and interceptors live and also greatly increases the range at which enemy radar can detect you. As you say, these factors are not a concern against ISIS or similar. But matter greatly when fighting even weak governments.
This article claims that B-52’s have even been used for close air support (!!!). They can circle over the conflict zone for 12 hours or more with aerial refuelling and apparently with smart bombs they can be accurate enough to hit the bad guys and not the good guys even from high altitudes. The avionics on them have been upgraded many times and I imagine they also have electronic warfare and jamming capabilities on at least some of them (there’s enough space so why wouldn’t you? but of course details are classified).
It makes absolutely zero sense to use modern stealth planes (B-2) or even 4th generation fighters to bomb insurgents in technicals. The drones and B-52’s can linger for hours and strike when needed, and even though they are not “stealth” there’s very little risk involved.
And for weak governments the first thing the US does in any conflict is utterly destroy the air defense network of the enemy using wild weasels and stealth aircraft. So after the first day it’s pretty much safe to use B-52’s and drones.
…and of course, even if they can’t get a lock, they can send an interceptor to the general area where it’s at with instructions to eyeball it and shoot it down. I recall reading in some open source literature after the Iraq War that the US was pretty flustered to learn from interrogating Iraqi AD types how easily the Iraqis could track stealth A/C on VHF.
Being the guy in an interceptor that’s told to go up and eyeball and shoot down a B-2 would be scary as shit in an actual shooting war with Americans. F-22s are the finest air superiority aircraft ever created.
In an actual shooting war with the Russians, B-2 are going to be dedicated to their original purpose, which penetrates Russian airspace and look for mobile launchers and high-value targets.
F22, yes. Its pretty devastating in WVR combat with its thrust vectored nozzles, I think only Su-35 has a chance in close up combat.
…But that means that you have to escort the B-2 with F-22s, which means that it isn’t just “risking two pilots and one plane”. And if non-stealth aircraft can operate safely in the theater, then why send stealths?
And if you want to take out a power grid, there are a lot of cheaper and more effective ways to do it than using a localized EMP. The simplest is metallic ribbons that you drop over the power lines to cause a whole lot of shorts. Or if you prefer a less subtle approach, you can just use conventional weapons against power plants and substations.
The B-2s are a classic example of a gold-plated military asset that is too valuable to use unless it’s WWIII. If we’re fighting a first rank enemy force like Russia or China then we might as well use up the B-2s along with most of the population centers of the northern hemisphere.
If we’re fighting a second rank enemy then it’s too risky since your Irans or Pakistans and such might get lucky, and a shot-down B-2 is a propaganda and intelligence bonanza.
Against a third rank enemy like ISIS there aren’t any targets that can’t be hit by plain old regular cheaper planes, and there aren’t any high-value targets anyway.
In other words, if the enemy force has halfway decent air defenses such that you’d want a stealth bomber to evade those defenses, you can’t afford to risk your billion dollar aircraft against those defenses. And if they don’t have any sort of respectable air defenses you don’t need a stealth bomber anyway.
The issue would still be refueling, unless the F-22s are already in-theater (in which case, no need to strike Assad or another regime with B-2s, just use the F-22s or F-35s with JDAMs.)
Makes me wonder if the new B-21 Raider bomber should have had the requirement of being able to fly halfway around the world, strike, and come all the way back home without refueling. It would solve a many-decades-long Pentagon bomber headache.
That would be a pretty tall order considering the fact that the planes with the longest range now have about half of that. Sure you can make it bigger so it can carry more fuel, but the B-2 is already huge (its wingspan is only 6 meters less than a 747). Seems to me making it big enough to carry that much fuel would get into “totally impractical” territory.
IMO, you’d need a breakthrough energy source (eg fusion) or go back to one the crazy nuclear fission powered bombers they conceptualised in the 1960s.