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Air Force Says F-35 Glitches Mean the A-10 Will Keep Flying 'Indefinitely' (jalopnik.com)
The A-10 aircraft "is just too effective to get rid of," wrote one defense blogger -- especially in light of ongoing issues with the F-35.
schwit1 quotes Jalopnik:
Strategists have feared that the jet will be axed in favor of funding the F-35, but the U.S. Air Force recently confirmed that it plans to keep the A-10 flying "indefinitely." While the Air Force is theoretically supposed to be diverting the A-10's operating expenses to feed the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the people in charge are now planning to keep the plane running...
Air Force Materiel Command chief Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski told AviationWeek in a interview, "Our command, anyway, is approaching this as another airplane that we are sustaining indefinitely." While the beancounters and product planners are trying to push the A-10 off the board, Materiel Command is going to keep on keeping the planes in peak condition, which will give the A-10 it's best chance of proving its worth over and over again. And it seems to be working -- the A-10 posted a 5% increase in its availability rate from 2014 to 2015, and the Air Force seems to keep postponing its demise.
In Congress one representative has even suggested an operational testing "fly-off" between the two aircraft -- a jet-vs-jet competition to determine whether any more A-10s get retired.
Air Force Materiel Command chief Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski told AviationWeek in a interview, "Our command, anyway, is approaching this as another airplane that we are sustaining indefinitely." While the beancounters and product planners are trying to push the A-10 off the board, Materiel Command is going to keep on keeping the planes in peak condition, which will give the A-10 it's best chance of proving its worth over and over again. And it seems to be working -- the A-10 posted a 5% increase in its availability rate from 2014 to 2015, and the Air Force seems to keep postponing its demise.
In Congress one representative has even suggested an operational testing "fly-off" between the two aircraft -- a jet-vs-jet competition to determine whether any more A-10s get retired.
BRRRRRRRT!
No. A lot of money has been spent but a lot more will still be spent in future.
On one hand one should not count the sunk cost when thinking of what is the best strategy to go forward, but on the other hand one should remember that in a complex project things often seem very broken just before they are fixed and it is very hard to say from outside how close to being fixed things are.
As example the f-16 was plagued by huge problems with it's fly by wire system early on (they even made a movie about one of the accidents) and there were also claimed to be a failed project, but then the things were fixed and it has been fairly reliable since then and served very well for 40 years or so now.
There's really no question that the 35 does some things very well. The problem is it doesn't do everything very well, and they were promising it would replace many things that did several specific things very well. Gains HAVE been made.
The question is one of cost/benefit. Not "is there a benefit" - there is.
Sunk cost is sunk cost. How much you spent on a project in the past is irrelevant at this point in time.
What matters is finding the most advantageous way to proceed, given where you are at now. That may mean following through on a big, bloated sunk expenditure, or it may mean completely scrapping it. But it's got nothing to do with the money which has been spent already.
#DeleteChrome
Nothing has ever proposed to do what the A-10 can do. The F-35 was just supposed to get sufficienlty similar results. Just not doing so flying so low and slow that the pilots can recognize individual targets, ensuring fire solely on the enemy. "Air strikes", as we learned in Vietnam, don't care who they hit, they just hit the target area. So cal in one too close, you are dead. Call in your own coordinates, not the enemy, and you are dead (yes, it's happened). But such errors with an A-10 are often less, as the A-10 pilot is low enough and slow enough to be able to visually verify a target. The tactics of the ground troop have adapted to the A-10. If they know they can call in support, they try to engage the enemy first. Get them into a defensive group. Close and moving. Then the A-10 mows them down. With explosives-based air support from an aircraft outside visual range, you call in coordinates of the enemy, and bomb them from afar. This reduces the kills, includes more civilians, and is generally worse than the tactics used with an A-10 nearby.
A-10 works with corrdinated ground and air attack. Most other air support is mutually exclusive with ground support (except on massive fields of engagement we haven't seen in 50 years).
Learn to love Alaska
Just think, Tomahawk cruise missiles are over a million dollars a pop. Fire 400 of them and that's 400 million dollars that's just going to explode and destroy about a billion dollars worth of infrastructure. It's so easy to tear shit up and so hard to build stuff. You're right, what a waste. Imagine if we just quit all this stupid shit and left each other alone how much better off we'd all be. Nah! We're human and being human is to fuck up over and over and over ever since Cain killed Abel.
One A10 is worth five F35s in current operational practice.
No sig today...
The A-10 is perfect for the current kind of wars we're fighting for one single reason: It's cheap and cheap to maintain.
Can't be used against modern tanks? No problem, terrorists have obsolete equipment. Vulnerable to SAM fire? No problem, all they have is shoulder mounted and it can deal with this. Can't be used against an enemy with an air force? No problem either, terrorists have no air force.
Yes, this is going to be a problem when facing an enemy of equal size. But for spanking towelheads? Perfect tool.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The fact that lots has been invested in the past should be ignored.
Yes, it should be ignored for accounting, but it should not be ignored for accountability. The F-35 program has been a disaster, for mostly predictable, and predicted, reasons. It was a "kitchen sink" boondoggle, designed to be everything for everyone. It is even designed to take off vertically, like a helicopter, which inflated the cost and compromises its ability to do almost everything else. It was designed to fight "yesterday's war", while the future is obviously unmanned drones. But the USAF top brass are pilots, so they simply put on their blinders and ignore the future, so they can get the new toys and wear those snazzy leather flight jackets.
A lot of people should lose their jobs for this fiasco. But more importantly, we need to learn some lessons about project management and strategic planning, so things like this don't continue to recur.
It ain't pretty. It ain't fast. It ain't a lot of things. What it *is*, though, is a mechanically-simple, easy-to-maintain aircraft that does exactly what it means to do, does it well, and is not inconvenienced in the slightest.
It can absorb a ridiculous amount of abuse from bad guys, it can loiter on-scene longer than any comparable aircraft, it can get low enough and slow enough to see exactly who to kill (not the good guys, not the civilians), and it does all this with lower operational costs than most other aircraft out there.
I drive a pickup truck. An Audi R8 is much sexier, but for daily operation, not worrying if I get dinged in the parking lot, and getting ish done, I'll stick with the truck.
2. Pork wing program or falling apart? If they are 'falling apart' then I do not think a program to remediate that would be considered pork.
3. A bunch were lost in 2003? Please enumerate. I know of only one combat loss of an A-10 in Iraq since 2003.
4. The A-10 has a slightly lower rate of blue-on-blue incidents than other aircraft performing close air support. In any case, the numbers of friendly fire incidents by aircraft of any type are astonishingly low compared to the number of sorties flown. Statistically minimal.
5. What WWII CAS aircraft exceeded the A-10 in speed? The big CAS birds of that war, Junkers 87 and the II-2 were both a couple hundred miles per hour slower. The P-47 was at least in the same ball park as the A-10.
6. How often is a CAS mission called for and time from base is a factor? Fine, in that case send a Strike Eagle. For all the other times, that loitering plane is ready to go no matter if it is sub or supersonic.
7. A-10 was designed to not need full size airbases. Strong gear. High engines. Soft tires. They are made to work from short, damaged and improvised fields.
So what are the really capable CAS aircraft existing today?
Why do grunts and marines commonly differ with you?
Are you suggesting that Donald Rumsfeld was the architect of a program that was initiated in 1996? I'll grant that his administration chose the X-35 over the X-32, but I don't know why you think the outcome would have been significantly different.
You know, the funny part is that he was widely criticized for killing a multibillion dollar "last war" defense program (the Crusader artillery vehicle).
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Donald Rumsfeld, but the blind hate you're spewing is exactly the reason that we have people lined up behind the worst two candidates for president in recent memory (arguable, in the history of the republic).
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
[citation needed].
You're blaming Rumsfeld for something that began in the 90s. The program was called the Joint Strike Fighter, and the conventional and STOVL requirements were there from day one.
As I noted above, Rumsfeld killed the Crusader, and he also killed Comanche and tried (and failed) to kill the F-22. You can argue that he could have killed it, but laying the blame for this at his feet is, as I said, just partisan hate.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?