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The House Armed Services Committee (HASC), for the second consecutive year, is proposing blocking the retirement of A-10 attack planes.
[...]The long-expected move was revealed Monday afternoon with the release of Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry's version of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which the full panel will mark up on [April 29].
The Air Force argues the decades-old A-10s are too expensive to keep flying. Lawmakers reject those arguments, saying the A-10s--which bring jobs to their states and districts--save US lives on the battlefield and must be kept operational.
"Rigorous oversight, endorsements from soldiers and Marines about the protection only the A-10 can provide, and repeated deployments in support of [Operation Inherent Resolve] have persuaded Chairman Thornberry and many members from both parties that the budget-driven decision to retire the A-10 is misguided," according to a HASC fact sheet accompanying the legislation.
On the downside IMO:
Responding to the Navy's and Marine Corps' shared list of "unfunded priorities" submitted this year to lawmakers, the House committee is proposing language that would clear the services to purchase more fighter aircraft than requested.
The Arizona Daily Star notes
Arizona [Congresswoman] Martha McSally [a former A-10 pilot and squadron commander] said she plans to offer amendments prohibiting both the A-10's retirement and the EC-130H [the Compass Call electronic jamming and surveillance plane] cuts.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gman003 on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:30AM
First off, the Air Force right now has no idea how to do procurement and acquisitions.
To give just one example: the KC-X program is to replace the 50-year-old KC-135 Stratotanker. They've been working on this in one form or another since 2002.
The plan was simple: take the Boeing 767, stuff it full of fuel tanks, add some fuel-transfer kit, and paint it grey.
After a few years of work, Airbus and EADS alleged corruption and insisted that the contract bidding be re-done. This dragged the process on for several years, ultimately Boeing won the contract again. In the meantime, Boeing had kept working on it, and had actually started selling them internationally - Japan and Italy are flying KC-767s right now.
But by then the requirements had been changed, mostly by Boeing, to "improve" it. One of the ways aircraft refuel mid-flight is by the "flying boom" system, which is pretty much what it sounds like. On previous tankers, and on the foreign-market KC-767, the boom operator sits in the back, with a little window to see the plane and boom he's trying to line up. The KC-X program is replacing this with an array of cameras and 3D monitors (yes, using glasses) for the operator. This supposedly allows the boom operator to be housed deeper within the aircraft, for added protection. This would be relevant if a single KC-135 had ever been taken down by enemy fire, or even friendly fire. Not one has ever been lost in any sort of attack. Plenty have gone down in storms or CFIT or even just randomly exploding, but operation under fire is about as important a quality for a tanker as aerobatics is.
In any case, the KC-X tanker is still not in service, and only at the end of last year did it even make its first flight. This is, interestingly enough, a far longer development period than the first jet-powered tanker took - the RFP went out in 1954, and deliveries started in '57.
The F-22 and F-35 are likewise fraught with problems and delays. The F-22 is at least in service now (although it's being deployed in very wrong ways - it's an air-superiority fighter, yet it's being used for ground-attack in Syria). The F-35 is not only not operational yet, but some of the infrastructure being built specifically to use it, is being redone in order to be functional.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Air Force is trying to get rid of any old planes that don't fit their all-stealth supersonic next-gen paradigm, even though most of them are actually pretty good at their jobs. The A-10 (finally getting back on-topic) is designed for a very specific purpose - heavy-duty ground-attack, with an emphasis on counter-tank operations. For that, it is unbeatable. Anyone saying the F-35 can replace the A-10 as a ground-attack craft is blowing smoke - that's like saying a Ford pickup is a suitable replacement for a Freightliner semi. The F-35 is a decent jack-of-all-trades - it can do air-superiority (though not as well as the F-22), light ground attack, recon, anti-radar, anti-ship, and so on. And that flexibility is valuable, although I suspect it's a better fit for smaller militaries, those not big enough to be able to operate specialized aircraft.
But the A-10 is a beast at the one role it has, and it does that role cheaper than anything else. Getting rid of it makes no sense, and the mission has changed so little that the only reason to ever replace it is because the airframes are getting too old. Plus, with all the ground wars we keep getting involved in, some nice heavy air support is probably going to be needed for a long time still.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:13AM
...with an extremely wide tolerance for "decent".
We discussed that gold-plated turkey before.
The F-35: A Gold-Plated Turkey [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Thursday April 30 2015, @02:52AM
Unfortunately, that's necessary (or at least, very hard to avoid) with a stealth aircraft. The stealthy F-22 has similar issues, as does the B-2, as did the F-117.
We definitely do need stealth aircraft, both air-superiority and ground-attack. A case could, perhaps, be made for an all-stealth air-superiority fleet, but there's plenty of use for non-stealth ground-attack aircraft. Once again a place where one-plane-fits-all hurts us. We can afford a fleet of dedicated dogfighters to own the skies, and a fleet of dedicated ground-attack aircraft to take advantage of those clear skies. A smaller air force might be better off with a small fleet that can do the same wide range of missions, but we're literally the biggest military spenders on the planet. We can afford a diverse fleet of specialized aircraft.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @12:29PM
As mentioned, it produces hangar queens.
As noted in Fristy's link, it is easily spotted and shot down by 4th-rate military powers (Serbians in 1999).
The big reason the F-117A hasn't been shot down MORE is because, again, it's a hangar queen.
Vertical takeoff is another boondoggle.
Dirt, stones, and whatever else isn't nailed down gets spewed in all directions for hundreds of feet.
...unless you have an improved runway--which then just makes VTOL/VSTOL pointless.
Want to talk about actual breakthroughs in aircraft design?
There's supercruise and thrust vectoring.
Beyond that, I'm hard pressed to name something new-ish that's actually useful.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Thursday April 30 2015, @01:06PM
Stealth is a float, not a boolean. You don't have to be completely invisible, you just need to be hard enough to see that you take far fewer losses. We lost only a single F-117, in how many missions?
The main use case for STOVL is small aircraft carriers with no launch cat or wires. Stuff like the America-class carriers or the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers. Both of which have their own share of problems, proving that at least we aren't the only ones with bad procurement procedures.
Thrust vectoring seems like something that will never matter in combat. Sure, it lets you do some crazy aerobatics - but that hasn't mattered in air combat for quite some time. It's a necessary part of the STOVL feature, at least in the F-35, so at least there's no real harm in having it.
Supercruise is unarguably good though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @08:24PM
I have this article bookmarked as
Conventional Wisdom vs The Actual Record On The Effectiveness & Costs Of The A-10 Warthog - Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey[1] [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [arizonadailyindependent.com]
[1] Sprey, a top-tier aircraft designer, was the interviewee who was central to the previous page here re: the F-35.
To repeat: Stealth aircraft are hangar queens--no advantage and extremely low availability; detectable with very old, cheap, longer-wavelength radar technology.
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday April 29 2015, @08:24AM
This. Exactly this. Having had the unfortunate experience of working in Air Force procurement, I can add the following as well:
- Congressional pork plays a huge role. You want a project that distributes subcontracts to all the right Congressional districts. Plus you must have the right distribution of minority-owned/woman-owned businesses involved. Plus myriad other, ever-changing criteria. At least some of the businesses involved will be frankly unqualified for the job, but they must be selected anyway. Needless to say, coordinating the efforts of hundreds of subcontractors scattered across the country, chosen more for political reasons than sound engineering decisions - this massively increases project risk and project cost.
- Service politics. The Air Force is run by fighter jocks, everyone else is a second-class citizen unlikely to rise above Lt. Colonel. A-10s? down in the dirt with the troops? Ewww... Let's build a new fighter instead!
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:19AM
From what little I've read on that specific issue the long term goal is instead of 10 boom ops with mechanical controls spending 90% of their time as passenger, you remote the whole thing and have one sorry bastard working 24x7 continuously.
Also from a computer vision perspective they may be obsolete soon. Either way no point in building the plane out to have a human ops.
(Score: 1) by albert on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:15PM
That one should be "in service" as a black program. We ought to have a few thousand of them exclusively reserved for WWIII. For every smaller conflict, there's the Silent Eagle variant of the F-15.