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Terrifying Effigies posted:At least one of them is going on to better things: edit: Look clouds! 
tangy yet delightful fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jan 31, 2012 |
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Jan 30, 2012 23:57
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grover posted:The avenger is awesome and all, but the A-10 is an aging aircraft with a very limited mission role, and has huge vulnerabilities to modern missile systems on the heavily contested battlefields where we would need it the most. "Low and slow" was important when your only sensor was the MkI eyeball, but it's simply a huge vulnerability now. Isn't this what the Air Force said, circa 1989?
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Jan 31, 2012 00:15
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Armyman25 posted:Isn't this what the Air Force said, circa 1989? Yeah, and since then we've had the Gulf War, which proved the USAF right and resulted in the A-10 being kept up at high altitudes outside of MANPAD range in Yugoslavia a few years later.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:30
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Myoclonic Jerk posted:It would be pretty interesting to see this end up causing the old plan, or at least half of it, from 80's from happening finally. Apparently back in the 80's, the Air Force thought that A-10 was for babies so they wanted an attack variant of the F-16. The resulting A-16, which I admit looks cool, ended up with a 30 mm canon that fused parts when fired. While the Air Force was bitching about the A-10, the Army started to argue the Key West Agreement, which prevents the Army from using fixed-winged aircraft, was outdated and wanted some A-10's for themselves. That was almost done but then Congress told the Air Force that they had to keep using the A-10. Here's the A-16  grover posted:The F-35 is not a ground attack plane, it's not an air superiority plane, it's not a carrier plane, hell it's barely a plane. Also, do you not know about the LITENING pod? That's how most planes do night and most other Air Forces don't operate at night. What I'm saying is don't get rid of a reliable airframe that works with one that is broken and is being bought repeatedly despite of not being finished.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:56
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gently caress this talk about airplanes. I wanna know where our goddamn mecha are. 
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Jan 31, 2012 01:03
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Phanatic posted:Yeah, and since then we've had the Gulf War, which proved the USAF right and resulted in the A-10 being kept up at high altitudes outside of MANPAD range in Yugoslavia a few years later. I thought the A-10 proved very effective versus armor and ground targets. And one even shot down a Hind.
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Jan 31, 2012 01:05
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I would imagine the A-10s role is really being filled by UCAVs with their insane loiter times, optics packages and sub meter hellfire accuracy.
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Jan 31, 2012 01:06
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Flanker posted:I would imagine the A-10s role is really being filled by UCAVs with their insane loiter times, optics packages and sub meter hellfire accuracy. We need a UCAV with a GAU-8
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Jan 31, 2012 01:08
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Armyman25 posted:I thought the A-10 proved very effective versus armor and ground targets. It also got shot down a lot. 9 took MANPAD hits. 6 of those didn't come home. It fared pretty well against AAA fire (11 took AAA hits, all made it back), but like Grover said: "huge vulnerabilities to modern missile systems on the heavily contested battlefields where we would need it the most."
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Jan 31, 2012 01:17
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Phanatic posted:It also got shot down a lot. 9 took MANPAD hits. 6 of those didn't come home. It fared pretty well against AAA fire (11 took AAA hits, all made it back), but like Grover said: "huge vulnerabilities to modern missile systems on the heavily contested battlefields where we would need it the most." You do know we've made a lot of improvements in anti-MANPAD technology since 1990, right?
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Jan 31, 2012 01:22
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Phanatic posted:It also got shot down a lot. 9 took MANPAD hits. 6 of those didn't come home. It fared pretty well against AAA fire (11 took AAA hits, all made it back), but like Grover said: "huge vulnerabilities to modern missile systems on the heavily contested battlefields where we would need it the most." Where are you getting those numbers? I looked up Desert Storm and it says 4 were hit by SAMs (didn't specify manpad or something else) and shotdown. Another 3 were hit, returned to base and were written off. For taking on an actual military, that's a pretty good rate.
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Jan 31, 2012 01:25
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LP97S posted:Where are you getting those numbers? I looked up Desert Storm and it says 4 were hit by SAMs (didn't specify manpad or something else) and shotdown. Another 3 were hit, returned to base and were written off. My fault for trying to post and cook dinner at the same time. The "didn't make it home" and "MANPAD" errors are mine. I should have written "IR SAM" instead of MANPAD, and I also went back and checked my numbers, they're actually slightly different from what I remembered. The numbers are from the Gulf War Airpower Survey. A-10s lost and cause: 2/2 0925Z Loss IR-SAM 2/5 1500L Loss AAA 2/15 1335Z Loss A-10A SA-13 2/19 0622Z Loss OA-10A IR-SAM 2/22 1500L Loss A-10A IR-SAM 2/27 0932Z Loss OA-10A IR-SAM A-10s damaged, and cause: 1/17 0700Z Damage A-10A AAA 1/17 1200L Damage A-10A AAA 1/23 1630L Damage A-10A AAA 1/29 0900L Damage A-10A AAA 1/31 1600L Damage A-10A AAA 1/31 Damage AAA 1/31 1015L Damage IR-SAM 2/1 Damage A-10A AAA 2/1 Damage A-10A AAA 2/2 Damage A-10A AAA 2/6 1100L Damage IR-SAM 2/11 1130L Damage AAA 2/11 Damage AAA 2/15 0830L Damage IR-SAM So, again: pretty resistant against AAA. It got hit more than anything else by triple AAA, but that's because of the mission profile it was flying. But of the 8 that got hit by SAMs, 5 of those were losses. Compare to F-16s hit by SAMs: 1/19 Loss R-SAM 1/19 Loss R-SAM 1/21 Damage R-SAM 2/26 Damage IR-SAM 2/27 Damage IR-SAM And F-18s: 2/9 Loss IR-SAM 2/21 Damage IR-SAM 2/21 Damage IR-SAM 2/21 Damage IR-SAM 2/22 Damage IR-SAM 2/24 Damage IR-SAM One Hornet was also lost to an unknown cause, even if you call that one a SAM, Gulf War I showed that the A-10 was particuarly vulnerable to SAMs compared to other aircraft. Which makes sense, because it's low, it's slow, it doesn't have the speed to even try to outrun anything, and those multiple redundant control linkages all run through the same part of the tail, right in the area where IR SAMs coming up behind the aircraft to get at those big engines tend to impact. quote:For taking on an actual military, that's a pretty good rate. Undeniably. But if it's still a high enough rate of loss to keep them up above 15,000' in the next war you fight, it might be time to reassess what the thing's supposed to do. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Jan 31, 2012 |
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Jan 31, 2012 02:11
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Phanatic posted:My fault for trying to post and cook dinner at the same time. The "didn't make it home" and "MANPAD" errors are mine. I'm going to try to not act so crass, and in a way sound more like the Russians in WWII or 'Butcher' Harris in the same war, but those losses are inevitable when messing with low air combat. While the A-10 might not be the best compared to planes that go supersonic and have less payload, compared to the helicopters others bring up the A-10 is more impressive. I'm bringing up the helicopters because the A-10 is slow enough and has enough weapons to fly escort for CSAR missions, just like the A-7 did during Vietnam. They were used for this purpose during Kosovo in addition to ground attack missions. As for the proliferation of Manpads and other IR missile systems, there really isn't much that can be done. I know that the Russians have upgraded their Su-25's to be more aware of IR missiles but I don't know and can't find the specifics. There's also an IR warning on some of their newer helicopters so it would not be impossible. Last bit for possible tech, the SU-25 had a pod attachment for radar in some of their later models and that could be done as a possible addon.
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Jan 31, 2012 02:42
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grover posted:The avenger is awesome and all, but the A-10 is an aging aircraft with a very limited mission role, and has huge vulnerabilities to modern missile systems on the heavily contested battlefields where we would need it the most. "Low and slow" was important when your only sensor was the MkI eyeball, but it's simply a huge vulnerability now. Not to mention it's a 50 year old airframe and quite simply wearing out- aircraft don't last forever. We've gone and replaced the wings on a number of them to extend their lives (at $2.35B), but there's a practical limit before you might as well just buy a new aircraft. These are valid points (the A-10 doesn't have radar. What?), but the wars we're currently fighting are low intensity conflicts against opponents who can't field "modern missile systems." Planning for a war with China in ten years is all well and good, but for the indefinite future we're still spending a lot of time on COIN, where loiter time and payload trump stealth and speed. I'm mostly confused that we're trying to save money by retiring a proven, currently operational aircraft in favor of one that is, well, neither.
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Jan 31, 2012 04:25
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as has been posted, unmanned is the way to go if you want loiter time. and in fact payload isn't really as critically important with COIN in terms of "how much ordnance can i get in to the sky today" perspective. there aren't usually targets all over the place for COIN, it's far more important to have a platform in place to be able to take a single shot with a missile when the opportunity presents itself. edit: i get that everyone is saying "F35 will replace!!!" but let's be serious: for the foreseeable future, the share of ground support being flown by unmanned vehicles will increase at the expense of fixed wing aircraft
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Jan 31, 2012 04:30
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LP97S posted:It would be pretty interesting to see this end up causing the old plan, or at least half of it, from 80's from happening finally. Apparently back in the 80's, the Air Force thought that A-10 was for babies so they wanted an attack variant of the F-16. The resulting A-16, which I admit looks cool, ended up with a 30 mm canon that fused parts when fired. While the Air Force was bitching about the A-10, the Army started to argue the Key West Agreement, which prevents the Army from using fixed-winged aircraft, was outdated and wanted some A-10's for themselves. That was almost done but then Congress told the Air Force that they had to keep using the A-10. Those are A-16s? I always thought that picture was just F-16s in a an older Cold War-era paint job. Something a TFS would fly.
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Jan 31, 2012 04:43
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movax posted:Those are A-16s? I always thought that picture was just F-16s in a an older Cold War-era paint job. Something a TFS would fly. You're right, it's just F-16's with the ground camo. It was in the article I linked about that talked about the A-16.
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Jan 31, 2012 05:08
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grover posted:Do you want every car on the highway, every bird, and every blowing tree to show up on your scope? It's hard for pulse-doppler RADAR to tell the difference between a 55mph bus and an F-15 pulling a notch. It takes a poo poo-ton of processing power to figure it out, and ample processing power is a fairly recent thing. How much can you say (while keeping your job) about the processing power of modern aircraft? Given how rapidly civilian computing has advanced in the last twenty years I'm just curious whether, say, the device I'm writing this post on has more RAM than the avionics in a fighter that was built in the 80s or 90s. I sat on a lecture given by an astronaut last week and he mentioned how the computers on the Shuttle orbiter were state-of-the-art for the 1980s and now seem antiquated, though they still do the job perfectly well.
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Jan 31, 2012 05:34
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Chantilly Say posted:How much can you say (while keeping your job) about the processing power of modern aircraft? Given how rapidly civilian computing has advanced in the last twenty years I'm just curious whether, say, the device I'm writing this post on has more RAM than the avionics in a fighter that was built in the 80s or 90s. http://www.davi.ws/avionics/TheAvionicsHandbook_Cap_32.pdf
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Jan 31, 2012 05:46
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Forums Terrorist posted:Hey, I think I read that one. Was it the one with the nuke stolen from the downed B-29? Yep, that be the one.
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Jan 31, 2012 08:22
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A couple thoughts... Whoever said that UAVs are the future of long loiter time missions is absolutely correct. Also, whoever said that the future of air support in a counterinsurgency is long loiter time/persistent ISR/precision strike with low yield missiles (i.e., Hellfires) is also absolutely correct. Regarding structuring a force to fight COIN...there are more (and better, I would say) ways to deal with low intensity conflicts/threats than invading an entire country, overthrowing their government, and then spending the next decade nation building with multiple divisions of infantry. If you need hints as to possible ways to do this, look at what AFRICOM has been doing. The U.S. military is beginning to restructure to support this vision (in other words, more UAVs and more advisors, less large scale ground combat forces) while simultaneously trying to support the pivot to the Pacific (something that is going to take a lot of playing catchup given the neglect the Navy and AF have suffered over the past decade) in a fiscally constrained environment. China (and the Western Pacific/Indian Ocean region at large) isn't a concern 10 years from now, it is a primary concern today. Finally, regarding the A-10...there is a very good reason that after the first couple of nights of the Desert Storm air war Allied forces were restricted to striking at medium altitude. If you are in an environment where there are limited/no sophisticated air defenses, it is more effective/efficient to strike from higher altitudes, especially so given the proliferation of GPS guided PGMs (JDAMs, much more than LGBs, have literally revolutionized every single mission the AF has involving ground attack, from strategic strike to interdiction to CAS.) If you are in an environment where there IS a sophisticated air defense, the A-10 is going to be of minimal use (barring a large scale armor battle in the Fulda Gap, something I think we can say with some certainty is fairly unlikely these days). I'm not trying to wholly defend the decision to cut A-10 squadrons, because I don't necessarily fully agree with it, but at the same time I think people need to realize that this isn't the action of a vindictive fighter mafia trying to finish the Hawg off once and for all because they just hate it so loving much, but that it is rather the action of an Air Force whose back is up against the wall. We literally have no other option when it comes to funding for getting new iron...we have cut personnel to (and past) the bone, although more cuts are coming there, we have cut the O&M budget to the bone, we have slashed training hours...there just isn't anywhere left to cut. It comes down to making hard choices, and given the direction the U.S. is heading (as I mentioned above, low key indirect involvement in low intensity warfare along with the pivot to Asia), reducing the number of A-10 squadrons could be argued to make sense given that our high intensity forces have done nothing but atrophy over the past lost decade. Contrary to the past decade, the Air Force does have other missions than being the Army's flying artillery and delivery service.
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Jan 31, 2012 08:56
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Well if you wanted to save money you could start by nationalising key defence industries. :fascistsay:
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Jan 31, 2012 09:09
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Forums Terrorist posted:Well if you wanted to save money you could start by nationalising key defence industries. :fascistsay: 
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Jan 31, 2012 09:15
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Make the F-35(B)s run on time!
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Jan 31, 2012 09:58
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Forums Terrorist posted:Well if you wanted to save money you could start by nationalising key defence industries. :fascistsay: Don't you mean liberal say? 
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Jan 31, 2012 11:14
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Forums Terrorist posted:Well if you wanted to save money you could start by nationalising key defence industries. :fascistsay:
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Jan 31, 2012 12:10
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iyaayas01 posted:If you need hints as to possible ways to do this, look at what AFRICOM has been doing. The U.S. military is beginning to restructure to support this vision (in other words, more UAVs and more advisors, less large scale ground combat forces) The first thing I thought of when seeing we were cutting A-10s was wondering why we're still buying the Super Tucano but now I see it's to use as trainers for low-industry countries. Having seen public and private naval shipyard work I'm gonna say it's essentially the same in terms of delays and runover. In both cases they do stupendously lovely work and scream bloody murder if you complain, they get paid anyway and you fix it when they leave. In WWII the point of the yards was to build ships, not to keep shipyard workers employed, which is a key difference. (For laughs and an example of how silly DoD work has gotten, look at NNSY's website front page: half of it is sexual assualt reporting and suicide prevention)
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Jan 31, 2012 13:10
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Looks like the Rafale is lined up to win the Indian MMRCA bid.
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Jan 31, 2012 14:58
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Koesj posted:Looks like the Rafale is lined up to win the Indian MMRCA bid. Looks like it is all but done, Dassault is confirming it via Twitter too. Lots of money for the French!
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Jan 31, 2012 15:45
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Who were the favourites to win? I thought it was the F-15K/SG, or some other plane and not the Rafale? Also about the front canards increasing radar cross section, could you not make them fold flush with the body when LO is needed, and extend them when needed on take off or during dog fights or whatever?
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Jan 31, 2012 15:49
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Throatwarbler posted:Who were the favourites to win? I thought it was the F-15K/SG, or some other plane and not the Rafale? Typhoon or Rafale. The only two American contenders were the Hornet and Falcon, and they were out probably a month or more ago. I don't remember how long the Gripen or MiG-35 were in contention for. I don't think the Hornet or Falcon really stood a chance; great pricing, but since our foreign policy when it comes to India is apparently written by complete retards, India was probably concerned about tech transfer/availability of parts or something. Boeing had promised to setup an assembly line in India though, so 
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Jan 31, 2012 15:54
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movax posted:Typhoon or Rafale. The only two American contenders were the Hornet and Falcon, and they were out probably a month or more ago. I don't remember how long the Gripen or MiG-35 were in contention for. I don't think the Hornet or Falcon really stood a chance; great pricing, but since our foreign policy when it comes to India is apparently written by complete retards, India was probably concerned about tech transfer/availability of parts or something. Boeing had promised to setup an assembly line in India though, so Yeah I'm just reading the article now. How did Saudi Arabia end up with the Typhoon? They've always been Real Friends of America like Israel, you would think they would be getting F22s, or at least be on board with the F35.
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Jan 31, 2012 16:00
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Do the A-10 and the AH-64 have roughly the same original mission: destroy Soviet tanks? If so, would one platform be superior or should they both be eliminated and replaced with UAV/F-35s?
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Jan 31, 2012 16:29
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Throatwarbler posted:Yeah I'm just reading the article now. How did Saudi Arabia end up with the Typhoon? They've always been Real Friends of America like Israel, you would think they would be getting F22s, or at least be on board with the F35. They also bought Tornados back in the day so they have some strong ties to the same folks that made the Typhoon
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Jan 31, 2012 16:34
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Flikken posted:They also bought Tornados back in the day so they have some strong ties to the same folks that made the Typhoon Read up on the Al-Yamamah arms deal between BAe/BAE Systems and the Saudi government. Basically it was one big bribe.
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Jan 31, 2012 17:01
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Oxford Comma posted:Do the A-10 and the AH-64 have roughly the same original mission: destroy Soviet tanks? If so, would one platform be superior or should they both be eliminated and replaced with UAV/F-35s? There's probably an argument to be made for exactly that, but you're missing one big problem: A-10 = Airforce, AH-64 = Army To cut them both you would either need to completely/largely eliminate the ground support mission of the AF (greatly bulking up Army Air in the process and giving them fixed wing strike aircraft like the F-35) or gut, either in whole or in part, the rotor-wing strike capability of the Army. Either way, you're facing an uphill political battle on a slope covered in the worst kind of institutional bullshit and defended by some motherfucking entrenched interests.
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Jan 31, 2012 17:01
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iyaayas01 posted:A couple thoughts... That was me. Let's make out.
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Jan 31, 2012 17:28
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iyaayas01 posted:Read up on the Al-Yamamah arms deal between BAe/BAE Systems and the Saudi government. Basically it was one big bribe. I thought that was how every foreign arms deal works though?
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Jan 31, 2012 18:48
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The British arms industry has been involved with the Mid-East since the fall of the Ottomans.
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Jan 31, 2012 18:50
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Forums Terrorist posted:The British arms industry has been involved with the Mid-East since the fall of the Ottomans. Waaaay earlier than that even. Look up who built a lot of the Ottoman fleet in the ironclad age.
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Jan 31, 2012 18:53
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