Too Old to Keep Around – But Perfect for Fighting ISIL!

Actually nothing new there to be honest.

Way back in the 1980's we had the AN/PAQ-3 MULE, a "lightweight" LASER designator issued to all grunt Battalions and designed to be fielded at the company level. I want to say we had around 10 of these in my Battalion, weighing in at 50-100 pounds each (with or without tripod and all other accessories), and as the Armory Maintenance Clerk it was my job to make sure they got their annual calibration and performance checks done.



But we mostly used these with the expectation that it was primarily for our own artillery units in the event we needed to call in a Copperhead round. And they could be used for calling in strikes from fast movers, but none of us really trusted the technology. Nor could it be of much use when the "error level" was in the range of 100 meters, and much of the ordinance had blast radius of that much or more.

 

One of the proposed aircraft to take the place of the A-10 for CAS missions will be the F-35. The F-35 will have a gun...a 4-barrel version of the 25mm rotary cannon used on the USMC AV-8B "Harrier."

This gun, the GAU-12, will be mounted internally on the USAF F-35A and externally on the USMC F-35B (jump jet version) and USN F-35C (carrier version). The USAF version will hold 182 rounds while the USMC and USN versions will hold 220 rounds. This amounts to two bursts of the gun at two second intervals before being out of ammunition.

Meanwhile the A-10C can carry around 1,170 rounds of 30mm and fires at a fixed rate of
fire of 3,900 rounds per minutes; roughly nine bursts of the gun at two second intervals before being out of ammunition.

Clearly, in terms of the gatling guns...advantage A-10.

The software which would allow precision firing of the gatling gun on the F-35 won't be operatioinal until around 2019. Minimially, the U.S. should keep the active A-10 inventory in place through the end of 2020; and mothball them in type 1000 storage, which is essentially recoverable storage if the SHTF and a hot spot erupts into a larger scale conflict.

 

This is something that I can never stress enough in how the military operates.

Myself, I am a huge believer in mothballing and repurposing of our equipment and facilities. The rush to eliminate, destroy and close has me very frustrated because we often loose capabilities we will never get back.

For example, we once had 4 drydock facilities on the US West Coast. Now we have 1, in Washington. We once had bases scattered all over the country, but in the last 2 decades huge numbers of them have been closed. It was so bad that we had to over double the size of one of our bases just to bring a division back home from Germany. And other units have simply been disbanded because there is no place to put them.

Better to mothball then destroy, but better yet to move them to the Reserves or Air National Guard so pilots keep at least some skills in their operation, but not as much obviously spent in operating them.

Or ultimately if the Air Force decides it does not want to have a dedicated CAS aircraft anymore, then shred up that part of the Key West Agreement and return that mission to the Army.

 

The Stormavick type Close air support Plane is essential to any conflict.

 

Mushroom, I concur.

AMARG, which is the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, and handles the famous "Boneyard" at Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona has 4 basic ypes of storage categories.

Type 1000 storage means an aircraft will be maintained in a condition where it can be recalled to duty and fly again. No parts can be pulled from these aircraft without their express permission.

Type 2000 storage is similar to Type 1000, except the aircraft are designated as "cann birds" parts can be cannibalized for the flying fleet.

Type 3000 storage, this is considered "temporary."

Aircraft receiving the least active care are Type 4000.

The A-10 is a success story, it has fared well in every campaign it has been utilized in; it remains a relevant platform.. Millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent keeping the avionics modernized, The airframes and powerplants have been given service life extensions. If it must be retired, it deserves type 1000 storage.

 

The problem here is that I have seen what has happened to our Boneyards over the last 6 years. They are largely gone.

I first visited DM in 2003, and the number of aircraft stored there was impressive. And I have seen pictures of the place from the 1980's, huge numbers of aircraft, from WWII era fighters and bombers to B-52s and other more modern aircraft.

I returned to DM in 2008, and saw how many of the aircraft I had seen 5 years previously were gone. I visited again in 2009, 2010, and 2012. Each year the large gaps in the aircraft stored there was shrinking rapidly. I look at Google views of it now and am absolutely shocked.

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.1526568,-110.8429137,2436m/data=!3m1!1e3

Now recently I have seen a large influx of aircraft, primarily it appears to be from units that are changing aircraft or being disbanded. But all of the F-14s I used to see there are now gone. And seeing 18 of the 104 B-1 bombers ever made is something that really disturbs me. Of the 104 ever made, 10 were lost in crashes and 10 are static museum pieces. That means of the 84 possibly in service, over 20% are sitting in the boneyard. SO of 104 original B-1 bombers, only 66 at most appear to still be in service (63% of the original fleet).

And don't even get me started on the fate of our mothball fleet. It has dwindled to almost nothing in the past decade, and the current administration has made it a goal to almost completely eliminate it.

Once an item reaches the boneyard, it only takes the stroke of some beancounter's pen to relegate it to a lower form of storage, or destruction. ANd if it is put totally out of service in the military, I doubt an aircraft would be brought back because of the amount of time it would take to train and certify new aircrews. We that remember saw exactly that happen to the SR-71. Millions spent modernizing and updating them, only to have somebody decide it was to expensive to train new crews and put them back in service so they were all disposed of (other then a handful that went to NASA for a few years for research and were permanently grounded in 1999).

Heck, the Air Force does not even have the simulator to train SR-71 pilots anymore. They donated that to a museum a decade ago.

 

Rumor has it the F-117 is in Type 1000 storage if need be. In terms of bringing pilots up to speed on previously retired aircraft like the A-10.

Eleven sites have one or more MetaVR-based A-10 FMT (Full Mission Trainer) simulators:

Baltimore Air National Guard Base (ANGB), MD
Barksdale Air Force Base (AFB), LA
Boise ANGB, ID
Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ
Ft. Smith ANGB, AR
Ft. Wayne ANGB, IN
Moody AFB, GA
Osan AB, Korea
Selfridge ANGB, MI
Spangdahlem AFB, Germany

and last but not least...closer to home
Whiteman AFB, MO.


The concept of combined arms is lost on the short sighted, the Air Force prefers flying Swiss Army knives rather than the integration of single mission platforms.

 

The problem here is that this is coming not from the Government, but from a Politician. And I do not get involved really in political discussions, but there is a specific politician that for a decade has been saying we need to evolve the military.

But he was not talking in ways of better equipment or training, he means cutting funding and their reliance to equipment and forcing social change onto the military. Sadly, all that talk of "evolution in the military" has nothing to do with this discussion.

And yes, one of the problems I and many others see in the Navy now is the over-reliance upon missiles. And those missiles are either to strike a long distant target, shoot down aircraft and missiles, and to defend itself. There are none that can be used to protect people on the ground.

While general weapons are good and needed, so are specialized weapons. There is a clear need for both in our inventory.

 

Wow, I think I agree with everything you said and considering how ornery I am, that's a rarity even with someone on "my side."

I think part of the problem is that we have a (I hate using this phrase) Military Industrial Complex that knows one way to build up for wars, and a Pentagon that knows one way, and they don't want to live in a world where that way isn't what we really need. I've only heard this as hearsay, so I'm not sure if it's true, but after Vietnam the Army destroyed it's stock of counter insurgency literature and FM's, because they didn't want to fight wars that way. They wanted to fight the Soviets at Fulda Gap, because those were the lessons they learned from WW2 and Korea, and that's the type of war they were comfortable with. As a consequence, we had to rebuild counterinsurgency from scratch because we forgot how to fight that type of war, even though we had fought exactly that type of war within the career life times of the Generals in the Pentagon in Vietnam.

The entire world, and especially the parts of the world that hate us(which is a considerable part of the world), knows they can't take us on in a head to head conventional encounter. Yes, we can take out China's one aircraft carrier, but they are no doubt planning to take down our electrical grid while we high five each other over that carrier. It's not like we don't know there are real, non conventional threats, but those threats are hard, while taking out an aircraft carrier is easy. That's why we build the F-35 when it doesn't address any of our long term problems, But we know that system of acquisition and we know how it fits as part of our conventional force, so that's what we do.

 

Wow. Myself, I think that if we were actually arrogant enough to try a move like that he would tell us to go frack ourselves and then wait for us to do something. Remember, according to what they think they are doing something completely legal. And if it was so wrong it should be brought up in front of the UN.

Oh, wait, that would be pretty much useless anyways. The UN can not even take less then 5 years to decide what brand of toilet paper they need to buy. And Russia still has a pretty damned potent military, one that I really do not doubt could put a lot of pain to ours.

And without a doubt, the Russian military is a lot better run then the Soviet military was. The Soviets relied a lot upon the rest of the Warsaw Pact as cannon fodder, and their massive conscript forces where promotions were more politically based then through ability. Today it is a much leaner volunteer force where promotions are more based upon merit then party membership.

 

The danger here though is that Putin is actually taking a page right out of the Nazi playbook. And he is playing it to this degree perfectly.

Even before the start of WWII, Germany had expanded and became 1/3 larger and nobody in the west really did a damned thing. Rhineland, Sudetenland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Austria, they all fell to Germany and nothing was done about it in the West. It was only when they invaded Poland that war finally resulted.

Putin knows this, so he is simply expanding as far as he can before his bluff is called. And the longer it goes before then, the more land they will grab. And I can't see the US or NATO doing anything about it until Russia goes after a NATO aligned country.