Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

House Committee's Proposal Would Block Retirement of A-10 Warthog

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the from-the-old-but-still-able dept.

"gewg_" writes:

Defense News reports

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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
House Committee's Proposal Would Block Retirement of A-10 Warthog | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 48 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:13AM (#176480)

    ...with an extremely wide tolerance for "decent".

    We discussed that gold-plated turkey before.

    every time you want to fix some piece of electronics, you have to cut a hole in the airplane.
    ...and after you cut the hole and fix the electronics, you've got to patch up the hole so it's just as smooth as it was before you cut it, you know, with a bunch of highly toxic glues and compounds and then you have to let the airplane cure for 3 days

    The F-35: A Gold-Plated Turkey [soylentnews.org]

    -- gewg_

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Total Score:   3  

  • (Score: 2) by gman003 on Thursday April 30 2015, @02:52AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Thursday April 30 2015, @02:52AM (#176907)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2015, @12:29PM (#177049)

      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

        by gman003 (4155) on Thursday April 30 2015, @01:06PM (#177061)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2015, @08:24PM (#177601)

          In a 235 page unclassified report, GAO extensively assessed the Desert Storm Air War. That report evaluated the aircraft survivability data in some detail. The casualty figures cited above are indeed accurate, but GAO also found that the stealthy F-117 flew so few combat sorties and the A-10s flew so many that their survival rates were statistically indistinguishable: GAO found that “This calculation showed that 0 hits would be the most likely outcome for a non-stealthy aircraft [including the A-10] conducting 1,788 strikes [the number of missions performed by the F-117]. This indicates that although there were no F-117 casualties in Desert Storm, the difference between its survivability and other aircraft may arise from its smaller number of strikes as much as other factors.”

          GAO also found the total casualty rate of the A-10 (for aircraft both shot down and damaged) was extremely low, just 0.0023 aircraft per sortie, and that it was zero for the missions the A-10 flew at night--the only environment the F-117 was able to operate in. Significantly, the A-10 flew sorties more frequently at night than did the F-117, and it faced both daytime and nighttime defenses more lethal than the type deployed around “downtown Baghdad” that the F-117 typically flew against, according to GAO.

          Both the A-10 and the F-117 also flew in the Kosovo Air War in 1999 against Serbia. In that conflict, one F-117 was shot down, and one was significantly damaged. Flying a greater number of sorties, no A-10 was shot down.

          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_