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I'm not saying we should accept pilot losses (don't get me started on how special fixed-wing pilots are compared with virtually anyone else outside of ambassadors and above). I'm saying that in a practical sense, it isn't a threat to the pilots to have 70%+ of them in vulnerable aircraft as long as 30%- of the aircraft are capable of royally loving up enemy ADA systems before we send in the more vulnerable airframes. This is also part of why JSF might seem on par with competitors as far as cost. Order up 3,000+ typhoons and tell me what the cost is compared with ordering up 300 F-35s. Cyrano4747 posted:We've painted ourselves into a corner where an rear end in a top hat with an RPG landing a lucky shot can be a media nightmare. Even if it's just so much bullshit it's extremely politically important that the next gen at least LOOK stealthy and high tech. Not quite. A single F-15 going down in Libya over mechanical problems with zero loss of life and a successful CSAR gets more coverage than a Chinook full of dudes getting wrecked does. Our obsession with "no losses" is very specific to fixed-wing jets for reasons I can't quite understand. mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 01:12
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Which is why the future is drones drones drones
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Feb 20, 2014 01:13
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mlmp08 posted:Our obsession with "no losses" is very specific to fixed-wing jets for reasons I can't quite understand. America hasn't quite gotten over its greatest loss: 
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Feb 20, 2014 01:17
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Cyrano4747 posted:Because those are aircraft that are going to have US military personnel in them and post-Vietnam there is nothing that is as much of a political hot potato as military casualties. The US population really has no stomach for casualties and even one or two that are made big, public spectacles in the wrong way can completely gently caress up the politics surrounding a deployment. Take the Battle of Mogadishu for example - there were all sorts of reasons for the ultimate US pullout, but a couple dead helicopter crewmen being drug through the streets and the headaches that resulted is pretty high on that list. Any war with a +18 hour flight lifetime for pilots isn't worth fighting. More news from 1915 coming up.
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Feb 20, 2014 01:19
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mlmp08 posted:I'm not saying we should accept pilot losses (don't get me started on how special fixed-wing pilots are compared with virtually anyone else outside of ambassadors and above). I'm saying that in a practical sense, it isn't a threat to the pilots to have 70%+ of them in vulnerable aircraft as long as 30%- of the aircraft are capable of royally loving up enemy ADA systems before we send in the more vulnerable airframes. Yes, but you understand that because of your background and the fact that you actually understand how a modern battlefield works. Your average voter (gently caress, your average congressman) thinks that stealth and high tech weaponry works basically like in a video game. They don't understand that the day 1 doorkickers are the ones that REALLY need to be loving invisible to radar, as after that the air defense networks are all (hopefully) smoking craters anyways. No, their understanding is more along the line of the bad guy with the shoulder-launched SAM either gets the Big Red Light to turn on indicating the missile has an infallible lock-on, or he doesn't. Pick any movie from the 80s-00s featuring guided munitions and take that to the most retarded conclusion. It doesn't even matter if stealth isn't all that useful for non-contested bomb truck roles. All it takes is some rear end in a top hat with an ancient truck mounted 40mm bofors getting a lucky hit over iron sights and people will be asking why we were flying lovely old non-stealth aircraft in a combat zone. On the other hand, same shootdown but on a stealth aircraft and the narrative now becomes how obscenely lucky a shot that was and how nothing could have prevented it - basically how that F-117 shootdown got covered. gently caress it, stealth's basically magic to the public anyways. Even if you lost a bunch of stealth aircraft due to gross negligence and incompetence on the part of the military you could hand wave it away as luck because hey, everyone knows that stealth is basically God Mode, right? the military reality doesn't matter for piss all, it's all about what the public perception of it is and whether or not you've laid the PR groundwork to be able to spin any losses into either acts of God or, at the very least, not the fault of anyone important.
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Feb 20, 2014 01:26
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mlmp08 posted:Not quite. A single F-15 going down in Libya over mechanical problems with zero loss of life and a successful CSAR gets more coverage than a Chinook full of dudes getting wrecked does. Osprey.  Cyrano4747 posted:gently caress it, stealth's basically magic to the public anyways. Even if you lost a bunch of stealth aircraft due to gross negligence and incompetence on the part of the military you could hand wave it away as luck because hey, everyone knows that stealth is basically God Mode, right? Godholio fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 01:51
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Godholio posted:Osprey. Hey, a few ospreys went down. And one of them was full of Marines for no loving reason at a literal press shoot.
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Feb 20, 2014 01:54
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Godholio posted:F-117shootdown.txt lol, that plane. Even if some crafty guy hadn't downed it, it was bound to get wrecked by a halfway decent SAM system sooner or later. edit: bitcoin bastard posted:America hasn't quite gotten over its greatest loss: F-14s aren't fixed wing jets 
mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 02:47
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I think the thing about the F-15 crash is that it was a "no fly zone" with "no boots on the ground" so obviously that means zero danger.
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Feb 20, 2014 03:10
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This is an interesting discussion. I remember as a kid seeing a Burt Rutan design for a small subsonic jet with a 20mm Vulcan and maybe 2 aim9 hard points. Was pitched as a 'numerical superiority' home defense plane to be flown in mass numbers in place of ANG units etc. anyone remember that?
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Feb 20, 2014 03:20
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mlmp08 posted:
Flappy 'cat 
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Feb 20, 2014 03:21
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Breaky posted:This is an interesting discussion. I remember as a kid seeing a Burt Rutan design for a small subsonic jet with a 20mm Vulcan and maybe 2 aim9 hard points. Was pitched as a 'numerical superiority' home defense plane to be flown in mass numbers in place of ANG units etc. anyone remember that? Mudfighter. http://youtu.be/zG9LlHcX8lg http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_ARES Smiling Jack fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 03:48
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Regarding Rutan's Mudfighter- Around 1978ish or so, the Air Force at the time was starting to rumble about replacing the F-111, and their general plan was to remake the F-111 but bigger and presumably more expensively and with an emphasis on deep nighttime interdiction. The Air Force loving loved nighttime deep interdiction despite it being not very effective from a historical perspective but man it is tailor-made for "your mom" jokes. A reformer Air Force colonel named James Burton heard about this idea, decided it was terrible, and came up with something he named the "Blitzfighter." It was to be a 5,000-10,000 pound, single engine attack aircraft armed with a four-barreled version of the A-10's Avenger cannon. It would have a titanium bathtub for the pilot to sit in, a radio, and that motherfucker of a cannon, and that is it. No radar, no infra-red sensors, nothing not deemed absolutely essential for lighting up T-72s coming through the Fulda Gap. They would be able to operate from pastures or whatever like the A-10s were supposed to after the airfields got cratered and would essentially go tear-assing after the flow of battle at treetop level engaging tanks they'd acquire visually and cost 2 million dollars apiece. Basically a tank-busting version of the F-5 Freedom Fighter in terms of selling/giving allies a cheap, effective warplane. Burton started quietly shopping his airplane around the Pentagon to build up support for eventually whammying it on the brass like the Fighter Mafia guys did with the F-16, but a civilian aviation magazine got wind of the thing after a quiet industry meeting and blabbed about it in an article like it was an official Air Force project and the generals came down on Burton and stomped his campaign out cold. However, in 1982, when the military reform movement was a serious thing, a National Guard committee published a reformer-influenced report called VISTA 1999. I haven't read it myself (though I'd like to) but apparently the National Guard said two things that made the Air Force poo poo untold quantities of bricks: First, that since the Air Force rejected the concept of close air support, the National Guard wanted to assume that role for the DoD. Secondly, the National Guard was tired of taking old and busted Air Force hand-me-downs, and wanted Congress to give it the authorization and funds to buy their own airplanes. And they wanted to buy Blitzfighters. The Air Force, as stated above, flipped the gently caress out. Nevertheless, since the National Guard is a pretty big deal, there were Congressional hearings, etc., before the Air Force finally won. However, they did stop giving the National Guard worn-out F-4s and began shipping them F-16s and A-10s, but the Blitzfighter was more or less finally dead. Rutan's design seems very, very similar to the Blitzfighter specs and the time frame strongly suggests it developed out of that whole mess. P.S. The Air Force's F-111 replacement program, the Enhanced Tactical Fighter, never went anywhere and died a dog's death around 1984, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Servicio en Espanol fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 04:43
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Make the F-111 bigger? gently caress, why not just make a huge F-111 that launches regular F-111's.
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Feb 20, 2014 04:50
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VikingSkull posted:Make the F-111 bigger? 
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Feb 20, 2014 04:52
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VikingSkull posted:gently caress, why not just make a huge F-111 that launches regular F-111's. Ace Combat boss fight?
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Feb 20, 2014 04:57
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Well yeah but when I hear that the Air Force wants a bigger F-111 I naturally assume that's literal and they wanted a 100x100 foot swing wing fighter bomber.
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Feb 20, 2014 05:07
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VikingSkull posted:Make the F-111 bigger? That is/was basically the idea behind the B-1R proposal. Turn B-1s into more versatile bomb trucks/aerial SAM sites with supercruise capability and M2.2 dash thanks to four F-22 engines.
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Feb 20, 2014 05:13
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Servicio en Espanol posted:A reformer Air Force colonel named James Burton... Mr. "Pentagon Wars" himself!
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Feb 20, 2014 05:18
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Blistex posted:Mr. "Pentagon Wars" himself! Its a good book, the Bradley sections are interesting and all but I actually wish he spent more time on the Air Force bureaucratic warfare, since he had a much more intimate perspective there rather than his kinda-sorta outsider fight with the Army. The Army trying to get him literally transferred to Alaska rather than go through with his live-fire Bradley testing was hilarious though. Ed. Making the Enhanced Tactical Fighter or whatever bigger than the F-111 would have been the inevitable consequence of solving the F-111's problems of being a glitchy, complex aircraft by making the successor more complex, and thus bigger to hold all the new poo poo they'd be shoe-horning into the thing. Servicio en Espanol fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 05:24
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It should at least be a bigger version of itself.
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Feb 20, 2014 06:44
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Servicio en Espanol posted:The Air Force, as stated above, flipped the gently caress out. Nevertheless, since the National Guard is a pretty big deal, there were Congressional hearings, etc., before the Air Force finally won. However, they did stop giving the National Guard worn-out F-4s and began shipping them F-16s and A-10s, but the Blitzfighter was more or less finally dead. The A-10 (and by extension, the Blitzfighter) was unpopular for several reasons: 1) Fairchild didn't have the lobbyist clout that Lockheed, Grumman, Boeing, et al. had at the time, and it's bad for business to let a smaller corporation get one over on a mega-large one. This is also why the Blitzfighter never had a chance. 2) The Fulda Gap tripwire was seen as the "gently caress it, tac nuke time" trigger for NATO, and there were a *lot* of cushy post-career jobs available lobbying for more GLCMs and Pershing IIs, since those were being built by General Dynamics and Martin-Marietta, respectively. Anything that made it possible to fight the ~rampaging Red hordes~ conventionally was bad for business and payola, which further proves defense contractors are worse than Satan since lobbying against conventional solutions made an escalation to strategic-level nuclear war *way* more likely. Obviously the Air Force wanted GLCMs and the Army wanted their Pershings - neither wanted the A-10 around to gently caress up their pissing match, despite the A-10 likely being a lifesaver to the Army. It really was a pissing contest over which side got a bigger piece of Armageddon Pie. 3) Like most lottery winners find out after stupidly buying something like a Ferrari, buying something expensive generally means it's complex. Complex things break more easily and more often. This is where defense contractors and their pet subsidiaries *really* make their lasting profits. A cheap and effective weapons platform means less intensive maintenance over the life of the product. And the more cost-effective and cheap a product is, the longer the end user will want to purchase it, which means keeping assembly lines open and producing said cheap and cost-effective product. It's far more lucrative to kill production on the cheap and cost-effective product and re-purpose the line and labor for a more complex and costly product. Top brass also adore attaching themselves to ultra-expensive projects only, and will routinely try to push through poo poo because once you hitch your rear end to something, you (and your career) are committed. 4) The Air Force generally doesn't like 'dirty' jobs - especially CAS. CAS (Close Air Support) is a *very* dirty job which, even in peacetime, results in higher losses and higher maintenance costs attributable to training. CAS aircraft in wartime have extremely high loss rates, and if there's one thing that will *ever* gently caress up an Air Force pilot's career, it's *any* incident which results in a loss of aircraft under even the slightest of circumstances that could suggest pilot error and/or incompetence. There's a saying for Navy and Air Force pilots - that if you're not sure if there's a rule about something, in the Navy you can go ahead and do it, while in the Air Force you need to ask your superior first. 5) In light of #2, some people ask why the Army (or Marines) didn't operate the A-10 in lieu of the Air Force. And again, it's inter-service in-fighting. Even though Air Force brass has historically hated the A-10 despite its loving amazing service record and reliability, the only thing they hate more is being one-upped by other branches. The Air Force hates the Army and the Navy, the Army hates the Air Force and Navy, the Navy hates the Army and the Air Force, and the only one they all hate equally are the Marines. The Air Force would rather eat poo poo they hate (like taking in a CAS aircraft to challenge the Army's new Apache and potential acquisition of the Commanche) than potentially give more funding/materiel to other branches, and generally the same is true across the board. The A-10 also had to be *forced* into the AF's inventory by SecDef Schlesinger who was miffed at the AF's abysmal CAS record in Vietnam. 6) Burton was a 'troublemaker' and the Blitzfighter project was doomed the moment his name was put anywhere near it. So, hopefully all those  explain why the Blitzfighter had no chance in hell of ever existing, and gives more evidence on how the D-I system is broken beyond all loving comprehension.Also, the ANG was using F-106s well into the 80s, even in the high-threat Alaskan theater. They would've loved more hand-me-down F-4s. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 08:08
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BIG HEADLINE posted:The A-10 (and by extension, the Blitzfighter) was unpopular for several reasons: In a few hours you are going to get some rabid champions of Big Blue in here to vociferously defend the Air Force's fidelity to CAS and deny that the generals have been trying to kill the A-10 off since the chief of staff shoved it down their throats in the face of the Army's old Cheyenne project. Ed. The Army has repeatedly threatened to lobby Congress to take possession of the Air Force's A-10 fleet (and the Air Force's CAS portfolio) whenever the Air Force had threatened to retire them over the past oh thirty years. BONUS ANECDOTE FROM HISTORY! A young Air Force officer was giving a briefing to General Curtis LeMay one time regarding the Soviet threat, etc., and he consistently referred to the Soviets as "the enemy." LeMay goes, "Son, the Soviets are our opponent. Our enemy is The Navy." This has been a BONUS ANECDOTE FROM HISTORY! Servicio en Espanol fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 08:23
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Servicio en Espanol posted:In a few hours you are going to get some rabid defenders of Big Blue in here to vociferously defend the Air Force's fidelity to CAS and deny that the generals have been trying to kill the A-10 off since the chief of staff shoved it down their throats in the face of the Army's old Cheyenne project. As I just edited in, it was SecDef Schlesinger that shoved the A-10 down the AF's throats. And defenders aside, the Air Force has never enjoyed the job of supporting ground forces. Just ask a ground pounder who's seen action how fun it is to get a green light from an orbiting B-52 or B-1 for a JDAM strike.
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Feb 20, 2014 08:30
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Anyone have the skinny on the Comanche? My gut told me at the time it didn't seem like a great plan and that its cancellation was for the best.
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Feb 20, 2014 08:31
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priznat posted:Anyone have the skinny on the Comanche? My gut told me at the time it didn't seem like a great plan and that its cancellation was for the best. 1) Cost overruns. 2) In the Gulf War, Kosovo, 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation, and Afghanistan, Apaches suffered more damage than any other aerial weapons platform. Even if they have a high rate of functionality while damaged, damaged Apaches that managed to return to base were often eventually written off as total losses. Developing a 'stealth' attack helicopter with even thinner armor and a lighter potential payload was largely seen as a bad idea (tm), especially in the new 'threat culture' where a single hadji with an AK could potentially cause hundreds of thousands in damage to something like a Comanche. 3) If you're not strafing villages wholesale at ground level, attack helicopters are pretty useless in a theater like Afghanistan (and Iraqi urban environments). 4) It's much more cost-effective to maintain the OH-58s in the scout/recon role as parts for JetRanger helos are easy as gently caress to get one's hands on, even while forward-deployed. 5) It was billed as a stealth helicopter that was designed to support the Apache, a decidedly *unstealthy* helicopter. The Comanche's program manager was a real peach, too. Go ahead and look up its Wiki page for a nice little nonsensical block quote from him that effectively translates to "this helicopter does everything our existing helicopter fleet does, but we should still buy it because I've hitched my career to it." As a 'cautionary tale,' this is why he's now the CEO of a DoD 'training' company with no Wikipedia page instead of a Senior VP at Boeing. Losing your contract means you get hosed over. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 08:39
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On a related note, the Cheyenne attack helicopter that sparked the development of the A-10 is right here. Essentially, the Army was making the argument that they were forced to spend the kind of money the Air Force spends on fighters to develop a technologically sophisticated attack chopper to perform the Close Air Support the Air Force performed in a half-assed, unsatisfactory way. Therefore, Congress should just take the CAS portfolio from the Air Force and give it to the Army (along with some of the Air Force's budget.) The Air Force immediately started development on the A-10, and there was a fair amount of pressure inside the Air Force to cancel the A-10 as soon as the Cheyenne looked sufficiently doomed but the chief ~held the line~ because he was more forward-thinking. It was a neat helicopter though. Servicio en Espanol fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 08:47
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BIG HEADLINE posted:3) If you're not strafing villages wholesale at ground level, attack helicopters are pretty useless in a theater like Afghanistan (and Iraqi urban environments). Uh, no? They get used pretty extensively and advances in PGMs make them effective without too much collateral damage.
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Feb 20, 2014 15:16
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Feb 20, 2014 15:40
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The mother of all oil leaks? TheFluff fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 15:43
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...And that, kiddies, is why radials are loving amazing.
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Feb 20, 2014 16:16
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/\ Radials also mean you usually have a nice roomy cockpit and lots of metal between you and anything shooting at you head-on.
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Feb 20, 2014 16:18
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I'm imagining he had to land that with a nice 100+ MPH wind in his face while trying to peek up over the canopy and still keep his feet on the rudder controls? Better than crashing I suppose.
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Feb 20, 2014 16:21
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Robert Johnson flew one back in a similar state, but with about 1,000 more bullet holes.
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Feb 20, 2014 16:35
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PhotoKirk posted:Robert Johnson flew one back in a similar state, but with about 1,000 more bullet holes. what kind of deal with the devil you gotta make to pull that off?
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Feb 20, 2014 16:55
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Shithead Deluxe posted:what kind of deal with the devil you gotta make to pull that off? http://secure1.tagonline.com/~cradle/history/aircraft/p-47/5.html He describes it in great detail in his book. One of the 20mm shells that exploded in the cockpit blew the face off his watch. 
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Feb 20, 2014 17:20
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Be careful with your CAS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSzBCgbicbA
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Feb 20, 2014 17:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:the military reality doesn't matter for piss all, it's all about what the public perception of it is and whether or not you've laid the PR groundwork to be able to spin any losses into either acts of God or, at the very least, not the fault of anyone important. What I'm hearing in all this is that the general public/representatives is just too dumb to make these decisions And the military itself is dumb as gently caress too, so I give up
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Feb 20, 2014 18:10
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Going back to attack chopper chat, Army aviators will tell you they do not perform CAS. You see, CAS is a supporting role, and Army helicopters are a maneuver force, goddammit, so they don't do any of this bullshit "supporting other maneuver forces" even if what they are doing looks a whole hell of a lot like CAS. The Marines use helicopters for CAS, among other mission sets, and so they certify some pilots to work as forward air controllers (airborne), or a FAC(A). The Army wanted to get a bunch of helicopter guys FAC(A) certified. So the Marines offered to do CAS half the time and FAC(A) half the time in training with the Army. The Army walked, because Army aviators don't do CAS. It's all very stupid. Apparently, some Army units have paid individually for a pilot to get FAC(A) certified, but it's not really officially in a mission set and big Army says they don't do it, so joint forces don't really use FAC(A) certified Army helicopter pilots. mlmp08 fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Feb 20, 2014 |
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Feb 20, 2014 18:23
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"we don't provide CAS, but if you give us this CAS aircraft from the Air Force's budget..." Which branch has the "control the battlespace!!!" thing which is conveniently ignoring the entire strategic picture and/or anything more than four days in the future? Marines?
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