F-35s Won't Outdo A-10 in Battlefield Capabilities

Actually, quite a few of us did. As well as a great many of us who complained when the Iowa Class Battleships and SR-71 were retired without a replacement as well.

I am one that dispises seeing a class of military equipment removed from service without a suitable replacement. I do not care if it is a tank, aircraft, helicopter, ship, artillery piece, or anything else. And if you look around here you will find Apache and I going on at length about the retirement of the BB without a replacement.

And if the A-10 goes away, that is just one more thing that will not be able to support the "mud dwellers" as you call them. To bad many tend to forget that the primary role of our military is supporting those "mud dwellers". Not everybody gets to zip around tens of thousands of feet over the battlefield, or living on air conditioned ships where things are rough when the weekly movies are not delievered on time.

 

I wont quote Mush since he is ignoring me apparently, but to his point....

...part of the aging process of platforms is they become redundant in operational terms, so either a new system is made to replace the capability as a specialization specifically, or new platforms are made to incorporate the capability. It's cheaper to do the later and can create more operational flexibility.

I'd wonder if the SR71 lost its advantage due to its heat signature and lack of stealth against the wider disbursement of more capable missile air defense and sensors. The Iowa and A10 are non-survivable platforms to wield a specific weapon system against a numerical threat, and this can be built up at short notice as it does not need the survivability and flexibility that an integrated, cutting edge, and lean military which is both trying to maintain a technological advantage and while also have sufficient size to successfully respond and sustain operations in numerous theatres simultaneously.

 

The A-10 was relatively cheap and there is not doubting it provided a lot of bang for the buck.

However it is very slow, and despite being armormed and robust, it's not invulnerable.

if the U.S. wants to maintain a doctrine placing QUANTITY over QUALITY, I suppose we can field thousands of A-10s and F-16s for the price of far fewer F-35s.

This is what we did in WW2 with the Sherman tank, adequate armor but flawed, we out produced the Germans..and the Soviets did the same thing with their T-34 tank and IL-2 Sturmovik ground attack airplane. They over produced the Germans and even with significant losses, they won the war of attrition.

The A-10 is a solid aircraft and it's combat record speaks for itself, however it is an old concept.. the pilot is .flying into the teeth of the enemy wearing a titanium bathtub to protect him or her. More and more, moder warfare is becoming stand off. We are using unmanned aircraft and launching missiles and bombs and greater distances from the actual combat. U.S. military doctrine has shifted to minimize casualties, and minimize losses. Evading the bad guys is better than a frontal assault and absorbing the damage.

Ground combat troops, particularly Marines, pride themselves on being in the thick of battle, eyeballing the bad guys. They don't want technology to create this wall, this separation .from waging war. The A-10 fits into that mindset...a guy or gal in the driver's seat is talking to them and they are talking to him or her...it's visceral. A bomber quite a distance away from the fray, pressing a button and technology guiding the bomb with electronics and/or lasers...is not as "hands on." However...it is safer, as it reduces exposure to enemy fire being at stand off range.

Americans VALUE the lives of our troops..our doctrine is to leave no one behind and minimize casualties if at all possible. USAF has not abandoned the ground troops, the men and women who perform these missions take it very seriously and are there to support them...our Air Force has not turned their back on the ground pounders...they never have, and they never will...they are simply adapting.

 

It is not that we "pride" ourselves in it, that is simply our mission. Guarding embassies and securing air fields and ports for the Navy means that is simply the mission. And because it is by definition "Light Infantry", we do not have the Armored Carriers and lots of Tanks and Artillery that the Army enjoys.

 

There's a lot of ego invovled, and I mean within the service branches...not personally. Joint combined arms is really the most effective way to wage war and within that, there may be some redundancy. This is not to say, that we should simply have an Army and Navy and nothing in between which is what some actually suggest.

However if the common goal is to defeat an enemy, joint combined arms is, I believe, the most effective way to go about it, even with some over-lapping of missions. Each service branch has their own ego, and thinks they do some things better and it should be their mission and their mission alone. Of course in some ways this is true, but during war time, at some point the egos need to be set aside...designate a joint commander and fight as one entity.

If a Marine needs air support and an Air Force jet can make it their faster...I don't think they should wait for their own assets to show. A unified CAS, utilizing the unique assets, whether it's Naval, Army or Air Force...will go a long way to protect whoever needs assistance. There's no need to say, one way is better than another...if a bad guy is wasted, and a friendly is not harmed, I don't see what difference the platform makes or what service branch's name is on the side of the platform.

 

This was the big mistake that was made during the Vietnam War. General Westmorland took away the Marines aircraft in I Corps and put them under the control of the Air Force. The Marines don't have the artillery assets that the Army has and Marines use CAS like artillery. The siege at Khe Sanh was a direct result of the Marines not having their CAS. The only artillery the Marines had at Khe Sanh was 1/13. Also LBJ was micromanaging the battle for Khe Sanh from 10,000 miles away. Lessons learned and how soon those lessons learned are forgotten and we see the same mistakes being repeated over and over.

 

Again, Vietnam was awhile ago. The services have spent a lot of effort on joint doctrine and procedures for CAS now. Khe Sahn had a lot of issues being so isolated and weapon's and equipment of the day didn't suit the monsoon cloud coverage for CAS.

 

What mistakes?
Gulf war..
The U.S. and coalition forces defeated what was at the time the 4th largest Army in the World with minimal casualties. The ground war lasted all of 72 hours.

(346 deaths in total from all causes) out of 511,000 troops deployed from 08/06/1990 to 02/12/1991

This was a large scale conflict under a joint forces command and it was successful.

The services do not have a natural predilection towards working with one another. It required the intervention of Congress with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act (GNA) to further the process of bringing the military services closer together.

If the military had been able to achieve better integration within itself, this congressional action would have been unnecessary.

I was in the USAF during the Gulf war and deployed in support of it and I was very proud to serve under General Norman Schwarzkopf Commander-in-Chief, US Central Command

As I was saying, the service branches do not naturally get along and some of it is ego driven...one branch thinks they are more important than another.

One team.

One fight.

This is how wars should be waged...with this mindset.

 

And 1/2 of those U.S. deaths were killed by their own troops, mostly by CAS. Same true with British casualties, most were killed or wounded by U.S. Air Force aircraft conducting battlefield interdiction strikes.

There are still advocates out there calling for one military. In fact it was President Truman who wanted one military, the Navy would become part of the Army and no Marine Corps and the Army Air Forces would remain the Army Air Forces.

Post WW ll every Democrat President except for JFK and LBJ have tried to disband the Marine Corps. Truman, Carter, Clinton and Obama. Obama hates the Marines. The U.S. Air Force always comes in defense of the Marine Corps. You may remember back during the Clinton administration, then the Chief of the JSOS, Gen. Collin Powell defended the Marine Corps and also defended keeping all four branches of the military separate.

I myself think we need to revisit the National Security Act of 1947. How well has it worked since 1947 ? We won WW ll with no Department of Defense, only a Department of War and the Department of the Navy.

 

Many of those blue on blue were from tanks mistaking friendlies for enemy armor, that had nothing to do with CAS. There were over over ten thousand armored vehicles engaged in intense and sustained combat; the fact there weren't more friendly fire incidents is a testament to those involved in controlling the chaos.

46 coalition troops died from blue on blue incidents in total, including an A-10 that killed 9 British troops mistaking their armored vehicle for an Iraqi vehicle

Yes the even the beloved A-10 makes mistakes, it is not impervious to the fog of war. In one incident where no one actually died thank goodness, an A-10 accidentily strafed a Marine unit on the ground. The A-10 was instructed to stay above 8,000' above ground level as Iraqi SAMs were in the area...the pilot fired a 2 second burst of 30mm fire at what he thought was an Iraqi occupied town in Kuwait. Turns out there were Marines on the ground in the vicinity and a couple of near misses.

All in all, though even one death is tragic, considering the sheer volume of munitions utilized, the casualty count from friendly fire incidents was reasonably low.

 

This is why it's been recommended that all Air Force pilots who would be participating in CAS mission should be attached to an Army grunt unit for at least six months back in the CONUS.

For example all Marine aviators from FA-18 fighter jocks to KC-130 pilots down to UH-1 pilots have been trained to lead a Marine rifle platoon into combat. (Every Marine is a rifleman first.)

During all three wars, the first Gulf war, the wars in Iraq and Afgahanistan you have had Air Force and even a few Marine aircraft who have attacked friendly troops by mistake. In both wars in Iraq you had Air Force pilots who misidentified American built armor, IFV, etc. as being Soviet/Russian built. I believe there was one incident in Iraq where a Marine FA-18 or AV-8B mistakenly IDed a Marine LAV-25 being a Russian built IFV.

There will always be friendly troops killing other friendly troops in the fog of war.

 

Not all blue on blue involving aircraft is the responsiblity of the aircrew. One incident in Afghanistan occurred because the person assigned to give out the 9-line brief swapped out the batteries in their GPS and in the process wiped out the existing data. The 9-line target location given was from a saved set of latitude and longitude coordinates where the friendlies now were. A 500 lb. bomb was dropped on their laps as a result.

The bomb or missile goes where it is instructed to go and in part the JTAC and/or fire team on the ground is responsible for giving the correct 6 digit UTM coordinates, description or painting the correct target. Also it is important to communicate where the friendlies are, nearest to the target.

A (*)(*)(*)(*) up along the lines of blue on blue is usually the result of a series of cascading errors, not just one (*)(*)(*)(*) up. Under the pressure of combat, you only get one try to get it right.

 

Hey Herkdriver.

Here are the finding od the investigation of the last friendly fire incident that I'm aware of that took place in Afghjanistan.

Basically a poorly trained JTAC team and using a B-B bomber for CAS.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/238691680...he-Vicinity-of-Arghandab-Afghanistan-9-Jun-14

 

The Air Force flies the most combat sorties, at least in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it would make sense they have the higher incidence of friendly fire; they fly more and they drop / shoot more ordnance Tankers transferred over 417Mn (million) gallons of fuel and flew 6,000 sorties....that's just tankers.