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#181
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
"Raymond O'Hara" wrote in
: [snip] how can you with a straight face ignore the two wars we are in now and the massive debt/deficit bush has created to pay it. We are nowhere near the percentage of GDP for defence we've had as late as Vietnam. And a high percentage of that deficit would have to be ascribed to domestic spending since Congress and I'm sad to say the Administration have exhibited scant interest in controlling that aspect of the federal budget. IBM |
#182
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
Typhoon502 wrote in news:4865a85c-f12a-4e51-8290-
: [snip] And to make an aside on the Venezuelan threat scenario, I'm not entirely confident that the F-15Cs would fight at a parity level with Su-30s, especially with the latest Russian AAMs. The Eagle drivers might just find themselves in a sticky situation. Assuming of course there were any SU-30s still operational when the Eagles showed up. IBM |
#183
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
On Jun 15, 12:34*pm, "Michael Shirley" wrote:
On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:52:15 -0700, Tiger wrote: Hell Right now the Pakistaini's & our Nato allies wish we learn to shoot * only the enemy. The Guys in the clouds are ****ing off the friendlies * Again based on yesterdays news. * * * * I'm not so sure I'd call Pakistan an ally. They're closer to the Chinese * as members of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization and a lot closer still * in joint weapons programs to them, than they are us. I'd term our * relationship more of a shotgun marriage with them doing the bare minimum * to not have Washington just set up a black ops squadron and just go flying * strike and interdiction missions in Waziristan that would cause extreme * embarassment to the Pakistanis. -- "Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral * Elmo Zumwalt, USN. Pakistan isn't a member of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. And given the history of them being betrayed by the US and left in the dust after they committed significant resources to some of the most important US operations, it's hard their blame to not trust the US. Remember Afghanistan, the second after Soviet Union withdrew, Pakistan was dumped by the US and US refused to deliver multiple F16s already paid by Pakistan and no refund was offered. How can anybody trust you after you committed such a blatant betray and acted as if you were a con-artist.(People with a half ounce of integrity would at least return the money if you couldn't deliver the plane for whatever reason). |
#185
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
In article , Zomby-
says... On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:16:45 -0700, tankfixer wrote: In article , raymond- says... "tankfixer" wrote in message ... In article , raymond- says... are they just going to magically appear in 10 years, full blown, armed to the teeth with ultra-fighters? Yes. Example: German 1930 to 1940. the germans didn't have the best stuff. and there was plenty of warning. the french built the maginot linebefore the german threat was known. you want to do the same today. we started then too. the u.s. built a tank factory and it was producing tanks in less than a year. In 1930 Germany was a semi stable democracy that was no danger to her neighbors. No one really believe she would be a danger again. Over the next ten years she build up her airforce and army to the point that by 1940 she had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Back then a fighter or tank could be designed and produced in under a year. To suggest that any country can do that now is absurd. Did you mean CAN or Can't. I think its unlikely any country can go from idea to production in a year like happened in WW2 Given enough resources an awful lot can be accomplished. We take an awful long time doing things right now over all sorts of debates over money. One thing that happens now is the constant tinkering with the design. Lengthens the design and prototype cycle excessivly. In another scrape for survival I think the US could do a whole bunch of things very quickly, although we would have to ramp up a lot of our manufacturing capability first though, or out-source the actual building to the Chinese or somebody. -- "Oh Norman, listen! The loons are calling!" - Katherine Hepburn, "On Golden Pond" |
#186
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
On Jun 15, 2:42*am, Ian B MacLure wrote:
Typhoon502 wrote in news:4865a85c-f12a-4e51-8290- : * * * * [snip] And to make an aside on the Venezuelan threat scenario, I'm not entirely confident that the F-15Cs would fight at a parity level with Su-30s, especially with the latest Russian AAMs. The Eagle drivers might just find themselves in a sticky situation. * * * * Assuming of course there were any SU-30s still operational * * * * when the Eagles showed up. I reference both the Korean and Vietnam wars where the supposedly backwards two-bit dictatorships had Russian pilots and maintenance crews flying top-line equipment for them. Do you think that Chavez would absolutely refuse to have Russian "advisors" back his power play if he could get them? |
#187
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:36:25 -0400, "Raymond O'Hara"
wrote: Hell Right now the Pakistaini's & our Nato allies wish we learn to shoot only the enemy. The Guys in the clouds are ****ing off the friendlies Again based on yesterdays news. every army has friendly fire incidents, even the pakis and our nato allies. its just a way to america bash. No - when the Canadians had 4 dead and 8 wounded at American hands in Afghanistan, your president made 5 public appearances later that day and didn't mention the incident in any of them. I think Canadians generally are bright enough to know that in war sh** happens but Dubya had no fewer than 5 opportunities to say something like "we have some bad news from Afghanistan and the United States is very sorry..." or something minimal to that effect. That he DIDN'T choose to take one of his 5 chances to say something like that suggests the ally is taken for granted. Had the roles been reversed and Canadian aircraft killed US troops you can be sure that both Americans would be PO'd and that the Canadian Prime Minister would say something. Had somehow our prime minister NOT said something like that Americans would be furious and rightly so. That's not America-bashing - that's how allies treat allies. |
#188
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
Airyx wrote:
[snip] Other potential adversaries with strong air capabilities are China (conflicts with India, Vietnam, Phillipeans, Taiwan), and Venezuala (conflicts will all of their neighbors). Britain may have a defence agreement with Venezuala's neighbour Gyana. Andrew Swallow |
#189
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:27:54 -0700, Mike Williamson
wrote: Are you suggesting that the US lease these light aircraft from their current owners (the method by which the "section patrol craft" were entered into Naval Service)? That's one way. The other is just to exercise eminent domain and pay them off in the event of a war. The neat thing about this particular deal is that you have a large pool of pilots who are experienced in the operation of the type that can be brought in and given training in such things as weapons delivery. That really speeds things up. Aircraft such as you describe would not have the payload capacity to carry a useful armament or the fuel for a useful time on station. Not true. First off, you can base these close to the FEBA, (Forward Edge of Battle Area) and they don't require a nice, long visible concrete landing strip. Any ploughed field will do. And as for useful armament, that's not entirely true either. Carl Gustav Von Rosen did a fine job of making monkeys out of the British and East German pilots his little squadron was up against, and in the Balkans, an amazing array of aircraft to include crop dusters, were modified for air strikes and did fairly well. And there are a variety of very effective weapons that these can carry, like small CBU bomblets, antitank bombs, napalm or other incendaries, rockets, and there's nothing stopping you from building them so that they could carry Hellfire or other small precision guided munitions. If a small UAV can carry it, there's no reason why our vest pocket TACAIR asset can't. And I've been doing some initial work on what I guess you'd call a universal weapons adaptor box. Instead of a separate black box and wiring harness for every missile you can hang on the pylon, I've been doping out an idea for a sort of military USB plug so that when the weapons delivery computer gets started, it downloads the firing & interface data it needs from a ROM chip on the missile. Then you deliver according to what you've got on the pylon, with no special wiring or added black boxes. I sort of got the idea from when the Brits were modifying GR MK 3 Harriers to carry Sidewinders, which required additional wiring. It was a great improvisation, but they shouldn't have had to do it, and the thing that scares me here is that nobody seems to have learned from the experience. The missile makers won't like it, because a universal weapons adaptor will eat into revenue for all of those extra black boxes and all of the tech reps and special instrument racks that you need to maintain and troubleshoot them, but plug & play in precision guided weapons is an idea whose time has come. Either way though, a modified Sport Light operating at the Brigade level near the FEBA will have plenty of loiter time, fast turnaround times and some fairly effective weapons that they can carry and use. And best of all, you get to skip all of the Air Force bureaucracy when you want to put hot iron on a target someplace, and best of all, being an Army asset, we could build them so that their radio will directly communicate with the VRC-77s in my old tank, which is a really nice feature, because air support requests don't have to go through two dozen people just to get aircraft tasked, let alone have em show up when and where you need em. Keep in mind that these aren't like an old Phantom II squadron where you have a battalion sized organization or larger supporting eight airplanes.. There is no reason that a light Aeroweapons Company couldn't operate 22 light attack planes with a company sized TO&E. (When I was doing my original research, I took the logistic footprint of an Army tank company equipped with M-60A1 (RISE) to define the logistical constraints. The complexity of the weapons in question is comparable, with the planes actually being somewhat simpler.) A Hellfire missile (used aboard the Predator, for instance) weighs 99 pounds, plus the equipment necessary to mount it, target it, fire it, etc (cost, probably several hundred thousand dollars). This is probably the smallest guided missile weapon you will find. A small diameter bomb (a "low-collateral-damage" weapon) weighs in at 250 pounds. But travelling at 100 kts or so, and flying at a couple thousand feet, you have to fly just about directly over the target to hit it with a bomb. We can do it better than that. My proposal for a universal weapons adaptor box is one way. And that thing would use COTS, (Commercial Off The Shelf) components and a Linux based operating system. The military USB bus would use software based on Hotplug, which handles plug & play USB devices. I'm looking at a system that won't weigh more than ten pounds. And that's do-able with COTS components. And with some of the stuff we can do with graphite epoxy, I can get weights for weapons pylons down and maybe a lot. And keep in mind that we could use TOW-2s as well. The new ones aren't wire guided and we can use tech developed in previous programs to give the missiles millimeter wave seekers and a rom chip based target identification library. There's plenty of room in the missile for that. Just because we always did it one way, doesn't mean that we can't do better. And keep in mind that the plane is designed at the outset to be able to adapted for ground support including external weapons carriage at the outset. And you can do accurate bombing even with a reflector type weapons site.. Back during the Korean War, the Marines were asked whether they preferred jet or propeller driven close air support and to a man they preferred the older Corsairs. Why? Because they could come in low and slow and put the ordinance where the ground troops wanted it. And the reflector sights were all that the pilots had and they did fine. There is precident for this. Count Carl Gustav Von Rosen operated with planes like these in the Biafran Civil War and did quite well with them. The CIA was attacking Nicaraguan oil facilities for a time using similar aircraft. And with the development of some of the new diesel aircraft engines, the options for tactical employment are greatly improved. The pilots skills one gets from a Sport Pilot certificate, roughly is equivalent to the skills of a Huey or Aircobra pilot from Vietnam who was carrying a TAC Ticket, if one excludes weapons delivery. I'll have to ask for some documentation on this. The FAA requires a total of only 20 hours flying instruction for a 'Sport Pilot' ticket- are you saying that military helicopter pilots only required 20 hours of training in the late 1960's? Note that a sport pilot can only carry one passenger (indeed, can not fly an aircraft capable of carrying more than one passenger in addition to the pilot), can only fly in Day, VFR conditions in certain airspace, and is not even considered capable of flying "for hire." Heck, a simple private pilot's license requires twice the flying training, and I guarantee you a private pilot would not be qualified to carry out the missions you suggest. A helicopter requires more time, but I can take a twenty hour pilot, give him around fifty more hours plus ground training and he could do this. A Tac ticket was VFR only and was a short course. Flight lead tended to be guys with an IFR rating but not always. The big difference is in being able to fly with a topographic map rather than an FAA style sectional. Terrain is important in weapons delivery in support of line troops. We'd have to tweak the Sport Pilot regulations a bit, but there are valid national security reasons for doing so. The FAA was mostly concerned with the amount of damage a plane crash would do if a pilot screwed up. They still tend to operate like their primary job is protecting Juan Trippe's investors. That's got to change. The Canadian ultralight regulations are a little bit better in this regard. And keep in mind that we're not talking about commercial pilots or people with a private pilots' license operating in Chicago O'Hare's pattern or any of that kind of nonsense. We're talking about taking sport pilots and converting them into ground support pilots able to take a low and slow airplane and use it for things like support of troops in contact, Bed Check Charlie raids, patrol of lines of communication, and limited interdiction, and those guys have enough training that if we added the tactics, some more emphasis on map reading and terrain orientation from an airplane and weapons delivery, they could do this. The two biggest things are terrain orientation and weapons delivery. But we can teach that. The Army's good at it. Keep in mind that these planes are intended to let you do your job with your head out of the cockpit and systems management is a minimal requirement, compared to say, what it was in an old F-105D flying a nuclear delivery mission out of Turkey. You're not going to be staging out of Italy, flying nine hours and then waiting for a Combat Controller to give you a target like you do in Afghanistan. These planes won't be much farther back than where you keep the medium artillery. They'll be operating off of old washboard roads and ploughed fields, not airstrips. They'll be a field weapon, and assumptions from operating jet aircraft in a TACAIR environment don't really apply. Such planes, if designed for rough field use, could provide several Army Brigades, with a couple of Aeroweapons Companies, say, with twenty aircraft a piece and the necessary support organization, for very little. The planes could be designed for air delivery, truck transport, or going back to Operation Torch, launch from Escort and Merchant aircraft carriers with the intention of having them land at airstrips in the lodgement area of an amphibious operation to provide TACAIR for troops thereon. They could also function as FACs, light air support for air rescue, patrol of lines of communication, ect. In short, they'd be useful. Not the glamorous jets that one usually thinks of, but very, very useful nonetheless. And at twelve grand a pop, they'd be dirt cheap. I don't believe they'd be "very, very useful." At best, they might be "not quite useless." They don't seem capable of performing any of the missions listed. Heck, in some cases, you are suggesting a or scenario for which there is no requirement, i.e. replaying Torch. First, there aren't any "escort or merchant aircraft carriers." There are ships with helipads, for which you use helicopters, which are already in the inventory and which are much more capable. Being an ex-ground soldier and knowing the limitations of support of troops in contact when you're dealing with jets, I strongly disagree. Being an ex-Tanker, I'm looking at this from a user angle. And most support jobs require a little ordinance at the right time in the right place, and these planes can do that. There are a lot of situations where a light plane with smaller ordinance can get you better effect than calling up the Howitzer Battery and asking for a battery three and screwing around with adjusting fire, when one guy who can eyeball the target and put a rocket on it, will do it faster and better. I know the circumstances and the targets and the effects of existing weapons and I know what these planes would be able to do, and I think that they'd work quite well and be more available and cheaper to operate than the helicopters that we're forced to rely on because of the 1947 Key West Agreement. And that Torch scenario is more likely than you think. Ever heard of the Vickers Containerised Weapons Fit? It was a proposal in the 70's for producing sea control ships and auxilliary cruisers and escorts by installing modification kits on containerships. And containerships are the most common and cheapest to operate merchant hulls in the world. Decking one so that it could launch and even recover light planes can be done in days. Most of the containerized modules needed to turn it into a working merchant aircraft carrier can be built cheaply, stored indefinitely and assembled at need. I suspect that the Chinese are doing this for some of their COSCO assets too, since it expands their capabilities and is cheap to do and because it makes sense given what they want and need to do. Look at Afghanistan and Iraq and our biggest problems come from the fact that our logistics are weak and our weapons are set up assuming prepositioned stocks rather than deployable assets. And that means that our ability to intervene and the time in which we can do so, are severely circumscribed. Light planes and converted containership hulls will do a lot to get around that. And with a shrinking military, less money to spend and a more hostile world than it used to be, prepositioning isn't all that valid of a logistical solution anymore, which means that the real transformation in military affairs is less about weird electronics weapons than it is about a shift from prepositioned assets to ones that can be deployed in a timely manner. It does you no good to use the most expensive and complex weapons in the world if you can't get them to where you need them and keep them operational in the field. The next war, we're not gonna be able to do like we did in Gulf Wars One and Two by using controlled cannibalization of assets in CONUS to provide a stream of replacement circut boards and the like. Our Air Force is getting too small for us to get away with that. (Remember that story of Burton's about that F-111D Confidence mission where only five planes made it to Australia and they were only kept operating by grounding every F-111D in CONUS? I don't know about you, but I found that one embarassing, and yet we don't seem to be changing any.) Light support for Air Rescue (I take it this is for Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR))? Yup. For guys who get hit while delivering support to troops in contact and on limited interdiction missions. There it's a matter of how fast you can get help in, and a guy with even light weapons who can keep the other guys heads down, is better now, than a pair of Warthogs and an MH-60 a half hour down the road. The longer you take, the more stuff you've got to have, so doing things fast is better than waiting around. Suppressing enemy fires in an area to allow forces to carry out the rescue has proven to be a project best equipped with a fairly large amount of available firepower- A-10's are currently considered quite useful for this work. In addition to a long loiter time, they typically carry a variety of ordnance that individually weigh as much or more than the aircraft you are proposing. They are also fast enough to get to the target area *before* the rescue equipment. Showing up with the rescue forces isn't a good way to accomplish this, as they then have to "hang around" in bad-guy territory while you sanitize the landing area. If someone shows up first to do this, then your light support is not required. Also, sanitizing the area of bad guys in a small, lightly armed and armored aircraft is a good way of maximizing your rescue bird's effectiveness, because they will probably have to rescue your light support aircraft's pilot too, when they arrive, if the bad guys are present in any force (such as, for instance, the force required to cause the CSAR event in the first place). If you've got time, and you've got the A-10s and the heavier stuff. My assumption is that more of our wars are going to resemble Task Force Smith type situations than anything else, which means that having the big stuff is nice, but odds on you won't have it. Remember that little situation in Mogadishu? Small, light elements are more likely to be okayed by politicians than big heavy ones. Everything I do, is predicated on the idea that faster is better and that a pickup game is going to do more good than a carefully layed on operation will later. And done right, I don't think that the risk will be undue. Keep in mind that there are some awesome weapons out there that aren't very big, like Dillon Aero's M145D gatling gun. Also keep in mind that these planes are flying close to the FEBA. They're within artillery range and in range of other supporting weapons as well. Working together, you can raise merry hell with that stuff. That pilot doesn't just have what he's got on the airplane. He's got everything that the Brigade has that can shoot at his disposal, and that's like waking up to the Wrath of God on a particularly bad day. So if he gets low on ammo, he can hand off to the mortar sections of whatever Cavalry Squadron or Combat Support Company is nearby, he's got the Howitzer Battery, he's got direct fire weapons of the Brigade, and all of that comes down like a ton of bricks if you're on the recieving end. Even the old Four Duce, (106mm mortar) is actually pretty awesome when you figure that it carries as much explosive as a 155mm howitzer round and we've replaced the old mortars with a really nice, and very, very accurate, 120mm that'll ruin your day if you're on the recieving end. And in addition to high explosives and hot steel, there's something else that the Brigade can do for those pilots. Smoke! Kinda hard to screw with the guys doing the rescue when somebody's just dumped a smokescreen on top of them. Makes target acquisition, to put it crudely, a cast iron bitch. And we Army guys have a tendency to look after our own, so those pilots have a lot of on call support that the Air Force guys can't get because they can't talk to the guy in the tank--me! Those little planes may be small, and they may be crude by jet driver standards, but they're no more and probably a good deal less vulnerable than the old Hueys and Snakes were during Vietnam, but they can deliver what's needed when it's needed, they've got plenty of backup that they can call, and there's a whole lot less to go wrong with them than there is in all of that modern turbine technology that looks good in the showroom but which packs up all too much when it gets out where the shooting's actually taking place. Patrolling lines of communications Actually useful during an insurgency. The trouble is, your insurgents will probably be doing their mischief during the night or in bad weather. Your sport pilot isn't actually qualified to fly in either, and at $12,000 your aircraft won't be equipped for it any way. Useful in general warfare. Our enemies have made close studies of the partisan operations on the Russian Front and we can expect diversionary troop attacks against lines of communication targets during a war. The Chinese are really big on the idea. As far as equipping those planes go, we can equip a percentage of them and train some of the better pilots for that. In Vietnam, our Army Aviation Assets had a mix of pilots with IFR training and pilots with Tac Tickets and there was a concerted effort to upgrade their training in theater as time and resources permitted. There's no reason to think that we can't operate that way again. And lest we forget history, good old Bed Check Charlie and the Russian Night Witches who were their predecessors, operated in planes that not only didn't have IFR gear, but they did it in weather that would shut our Air Force down. (Not to mention doing it in PO-2 biplanes, which had to be miserable.) We can do better than that, without having to go to an Air Force level of complexity. In real wars where the bureaucrats are kept at bay, you'd be amazed at just how inventive our guys can get. And we can do it with a $12,000.00 airplane. You also seem woefully ignorant about the entire concept of joint operations. No, actually I don't think that joint operations are all they're cracked up to be. For example, in Afghanistan, the Air Force told the Army that they couldn't even deliver towed artillery and that all heavy weapons support would have to come from the air. That's okay until weather goes below Air Force weather minimums like they did during Operation Anaconda, when the Air Force called the game and the troops on the mountain had nothing heavier than 81mm mortars for support. Artillery is an all weather weapon, but the Air Force would neither deliver, nor support it. At least towed artillery and light planes would belong to the Army commander and he could operate them as the situation dictated without having to worry about what REMFs in some rear line Air Force billet thought about it. Towed artillery DOES belong to the Army, and so does the helicopter airlift used to move it to a tactical location. The inability to put towed artillery into place was not a problem with "some rear line Air Force billet," as you so quaintly call it- it was due to the inability of helicopters to carry heavy equipment to the high altitudes required for Operation Anaconda. That makes it a problem with the Army transportation system, not the Air Force. The Air Force therefore didn't tell the Army that all heavy support would be from the Air- the Army told the Air Force that (and, given typical cross-service planning and communications, probably occurred about the time the troops boarding their helicopters for the operation to begin). The Air Force wouldn't even bring them in to Bagram, and that on airlift assets that are allegedly supposed to be able to operate on rough fields. Theater and Intertheater airlift is tasked to the Air Force, and the last time the Army tried it, the Air Force delivered a massive blizzard of crap that resulted in the Army giving up it's Caribous to the Air Force, who in turn promptly sent them to the Boneyard. And every time it gets mentioned, the Air Force waves the Key West Agreement like a bloody red flag and screams, "Roles & Missions." And in the case of the 82nd's 105mms, when they can't be moved in one piece, they can be moved in pieces and assembled on site. The Artillery guys know how to do that and they're good at it. If the Air Force had delivered to Bagram, they'd have had them. Bet the rent on it. If the tubes had been in-country, the Army would have gotten them where they needed to go, but unfortunately, the Air Force stated that they couldn't get the guns to Bagram. And the Army doesn't control that ALOC or the assets that move material along it. The Air Force does. And what you're not factoring in, is that the enemy doesn't wait for weather or for the Air Force to get their ducks in a row. When they move, the Army has to move and weather minimums be damned. That means that the troops had to be on that hill and they had to have support, and as usual, the Blue Suits in Italy were a day late and a dollar short. Part of being able to win in a war is to have a shorter OODA loop than the other guy does, and that means being able to move when you have to and the Air Force for both technical and bureaucratic reasons can't. And that means missing opportunites that we shouldn't. Giving the Army a field deployable organic light air support capability, goes a long way towards rectifying that dismal state of affairs. Actually, reading an analysis of the planning and coordination involved, it probably wasn't mentioned even then-after all, the US Navy, scheduled to supply most of the tactical air (fighter-bomber) support, wasn't even told the date it would start, and as a result had the carrier Stennis stand down flying operations on the first day. See- http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTR...c=GetTRDoc.pdf That's another problem. And that's why the Army needs an organic capability that is an asset in the Brigade Commander's tool box. Having to deal with things a thousand miles away when your S2, (Intelligence Officer) tells you that you've gotta move now, is a great recipie for a disaster. The Navy problem in that operation just underscores the point. As for weather minimums, you seem to think that they were created arbitrarily by some Air Force guy because he had nothing better to do. If the weather is "below minimums," it generally means that it is not POSSIBLE to deliver ordnance on target accurately- target identification and engagement in close proximity to friendly forces is hazardous enough already, you want to make it more likely that friendly forces are hit? Remember, without a visual talley on a target, the only weapon that can be delivered by an Air Force aircraft is a JDAM. This requires precise coordinates from the ground controller (which will itself likely be handicapped by weather). If you want a platform that can get under (much of) the weather and engage in close proximity to friendly troops in such circumstances, then you are looking for a helicopter- and shockingly enough, the Army has those for that precise purpose. As organic assets, they are also more readily available at the local level (they are NOT available to the division next door, who may well have a greater need for them, but that is what you get from organic assets and decentralized control). I'd rather have the guy who's in the mud deciding some of that rather than some guy in a soft chair in Italy. It's probably gonna come as a shock, but most guys who've done the Forward Observer's Course and who've had basic FAC training are pretty good at estimating weather. Then again, we live in it. And we've got some pretty remarkable means of targetting too. If we can see it, we can kill it, and these days, we've got thermal imaging gear that lets us see just about anything. The Artillery guys have a neat toy. They've got a gadget that lets you set up, take a GPS ping, put the optical sight on the target, either ping with a laser ranger or punch in an estimate, and it'll compute the offset and send it directly to a fire direction center. From there, they've got other gadgets that will figure elevation, charge, allow for earth's rotation and drop rounds just about anyplace that you like it. It's getting to be where they can fire for effect without a lot of sensing and adjusting fire from the Forward Observer. And this gear is getting more and more common. Now there's nothing that says that we can't build a little box like the transponder that the Marines used to tell the A-6 pilots where you were, so that they could guide off of you and hit what you designated under cloud cover. And GPS makes that thing pretty precise these days. We've got 250 pound GPS bombs and they're getting smaller, so there's no reason why the planes couldn't bomb accurately without ever seeing the target, as long as the electronics are working. Or, given that thermal sights are getting small enough to hang on a rifle now, (big difference from the Thermal Imaging Sight prototype I got to try out at the Armor Engineering Test Board back in 77, that required an M-60A1 to carry it), so there's no reason that I couldn't put SMOKE, (White Phosporus) on a target and have the plane bomb on that. In short, it ain't like the old days. Weather minimums for jets are understandible because they move fast and don't want to be smeared all over the side of a mountain, but an armed 100mph light plane can operate in the kind of light soup that a jet can't, with the right gear. And if it's cheap enough to festoon the grunts with it, it's cheap enough for our little airplanes.) Your arguements here appear to be based on a profound misunderstanding of the issues and circumstances, as well as a bias against the Air Force. Nope. They're based on a study of history as well as being a former Tank Commander who's had the fun experience of sitting on a range and watching a pair of F-111s come screaming in and miss the entire range by two miles. In the wars to come, the old chess game model is out. Look at it this way. Imagine a basketball game where it's played between one guy who has to dictate the moves to all of his players and a regular basketball team who know the game, have worked together and know what the goal is and can work accordingly. The way the Air Force plays it, it's like that guy trying to move players like they're chess pieces. And it doesn't work anymore. You've got to operate in such a way as to give your enemies a maximum amount of uncertainty and you've got to be fast and agile enough to react quickly to changes and opportunities while constantly reassessing and changing how you go about doing what you do. Boyd's OODA loop. The way that the Air Force wants to operate, we can't do that and no amount of crap about net centric warfare is gonna change the fact that our tendency towards long chains of command, lousy interoperability and loads of bureaucracy, cedes points to the enemy. We could get away with that when we were bigger than everybody else and could outmuscle everybody, but now we can't, which means that we've got to substitute brains for mass and come up with the most compact and responsive structures that we can. Our future wars are going to resemble Task Force Smith, in all it's horror more than it's gonna resemble WW-II or the Soviet Debauch into Fulda Gap that I trained for and fortunately never had to do. Nathan Bedford Forrest's old adage of getting there first with the most, is gonna be a watchword, which means that you've got to have deployable assets and really shorts lines of communication and control and that means that you're going to have to operate in small specified commands, (Like a brigade!) that have a mission, identity, assets and a common command structure, rather than the kind of unified command nonsense that the Air Force likes that should have been thoroughly discredited when it failed so badly in Grenada. It's gotta be a team effort, not the kind of chessgame crap that you get right now with competing hostile bureaucracies that don't play well together. Our guys are gonna have to move fast, be agile enough to change according to changes in the situation and to do so well enough to dominate it, and to perpetually keep the enemy on the horns of Sherman's dilemma. The current setup won't do that, and we know that because it never, ever has done so successfully. The old British Rail Task Force has got to become an American game, even if some of the players don't like it. I'm not hostile to the Air Force, so much as I am hostile to bureaucracy and military policy thats based on the most solipsistic assumptions I've ever seen. When you take a skeptical look at the whole thing, what you find is that most of what we propose to do, depends on the enemy being compliant enough to play by our rules, and that's not likely to happen anymore. Stuff like the Maxwell AFB Battlespace Dominance concept is mostly warmed over Douhetism, and the current avoidance of Boyd's Manouver Warfare concepts are gonna get people killed and lose us wars. SO it seems reasonable to me that it's not unreasonable to argue forcefully for changing it. We're not gonna get the wars that we want to fight, we're gonna get the wars that we're stuck fighting, and we need to deal with that. "Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, USN. |
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:40:38 -0700, eatfastnoodle
wrote: On Jun 15, 12:34Â*pm, "Michael Shirley" wrote: On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:52:15 -0700, Tiger wrote: Hell Right now the Pakistaini's & our Nato allies wish we learn to shoot Â* only the enemy. The Guys in the clouds are ****ing off the friendlies Â* Again based on yesterdays news. Â* Â* Â* Â* I'm not so sure I'd call Pakistan an ally. They're closer to the Chinese Â* as members of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization and a lot closer still Â* in joint weapons programs to them, than they are us. I'd term our Â* relationship more of a shotgun marriage with them doing the bare minimum Â* to not have Washington just set up a black ops squadron and just go flying Â* strike and interdiction missions in Waziristan that would cause extreme Â* embarassment to the Pakistanis. -- "Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral Â* Elmo Zumwalt, USN. Pakistan isn't a member of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. And given the history of them being betrayed by the US and left in the dust after they committed significant resources to some of the most important US operations, it's hard their blame to not trust the US. Remember Afghanistan, the second after Soviet Union withdrew, Pakistan was dumped by the US and US refused to deliver multiple F16s already paid by Pakistan and no refund was offered. How can anybody trust you after you committed such a blatant betray and acted as if you were a con-artist.(People with a half ounce of integrity would at least return the money if you couldn't deliver the plane for whatever reason). Look at their defense agreements, military history and joint defense programs, to include that nice new port the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy's building there. China and Pakistan are closer to each other than the US and Germany was in the Cold War. And if you look closely at that, what you see is that they're defacto members of SCO. And any professional order of battle in that coalition will include Pakistan in China's column, not ours. As far as doublecrossing them, I agree. Washington doublescrosses everybody. One of the problems with being as big as we are, and having decision cycles predicated on the news cycle, the fundraising cycle and election cycles, is that it makes for a government that has a rather short range view of things. That's bad, and it's going to bite us, and arguably, it is biting us. That's what we get for having a political structure composed of people who believe that it's possible to act without consequences. Welcome to the real world. It's one of the reasons that I'm absolutely opposed to handing over the Kurds to Baghdad. We've doublecrossed em twice that I can remember and I'd just as soon leave things in working order there, than to hand the whole mess over to the first pimp that takes a State Department employee to lunch. From my view though, it's not a matter of why our friends are fast becoming our enemies. We're agreed on that point. My point of view has to do with maintaining the national security interests of the United States in a world where our politicians have created the classiest pack of enemies that anybody could ever want, leaving us to deal with them if we can. And that means some fundamental changes to how we approach things, starting with the Middle East. We can't afford sideshows in sandtrap wars, period. Our capabilities have shrunken too much. Our industrial base is short, our logistics are lousy, (the only reason that Desert Storm was possible was because the British Merchant Navy provided critical sealift) our military overdepends on boutique weapons that we can neither procure consistantly in useful numbers or replace when they are destroyed. In short, we've got a mess. I'm not gonna argue the point about how we got into the mess that we're in. That's obvious, even to a Senator. Chuckle I'm not gonna argue that we've made some implacably deadly enemies, starting with the old Weiqi players in Beijing. That much is as obvious as a corpse floating in the pool. No, my point is that having made all of these enemies, we must survive having done so, and that means some major shifts in how we base and use our military assets, and the Middle East, is a luxury right now that we can ill afford, so I'm all for cutting our losses, letting Europe deal with their own security issues and shifting our focus to the Carribean, the Pacific and our Southern Border, where we've got some critical and potentially lethal problems. -- "Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, USN. |
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