GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As

"Raymond O'Hara" wrote in
:

[snip]

how can you with a straight face ignore the two wars we are in now and
the massive debt/deficit bush has created to pay it.

We are nowhere near the percentage of GDP for defence we've had
as late as Vietnam.
And a high percentage of that deficit would have to be ascribed to
domestic spending since Congress and I'm sad to say the
Administration have exhibited scant interest in controlling that
aspect of the federal budget.

IBM

Typhoon502 wrote in news:4865a85c-f12a-4e51-8290-
:

[snip]

And to make an aside on the Venezuelan threat scenario, I'm not
entirely confident that the F-15Cs would fight at a parity level with
Su-30s, especially with the latest Russian AAMs. The Eagle drivers
might just find themselves in a sticky situation.

Assuming of course there were any SU-30s still operational
when the Eagles showed up.

IBM

On Jun 15, 12:34*pm, "Michael Shirley" wrote:
On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:52:15 -0700, Tiger wrote:
Hell Right now the Pakistaini's & our Nato allies wish we learn to shoot *
only the enemy. The Guys in the clouds are ****ing off the friendlies *
Again based on yesterdays news.

* * * * I'm not so sure I'd call Pakistan an ally. They're closer to the Chinese *
as members of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization and a lot closer still *
in joint weapons programs to them, than they are us. I'd term our *
relationship more of a shotgun marriage with them doing the bare minimum *
to not have Washington just set up a black ops squadron and just go flying *
strike and interdiction missions in Waziristan that would cause extreme *
embarassment to the Pakistanis.
--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral *
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.

Pakistan isn't a member of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. And
given the history of them being betrayed by the US and left in the
dust after they committed significant resources to some of the most
important US operations, it's hard their blame to not trust the US.
Remember Afghanistan, the second after Soviet Union withdrew,
Pakistan was dumped by the US and US refused to deliver multiple F16s
already paid by Pakistan and no refund was offered. How can anybody
trust you after you committed such a blatant betray and acted as if
you were a con-artist.(People with a half ounce of integrity would at
least return the money if you couldn't deliver the plane for whatever
reason).

In article , raymond-
says...

"tankfixer" wrote in message
...
In article , raymond-
says...

"tankfixer" wrote in message
...
In article , raymond-
says...

are they just going to magically appear in 10 years, full blown, armed
to
the teeth with ultra-fighters?

Yes.

Example: German 1930 to 1940.


the germans didn't have the best stuff. and there was plenty of warning.
the french built the maginot linebefore the german threat was known.
you want to do the same today.
we started then too.
the u.s. built a tank factory and it was producing tanks in less than a
year.

In 1930 Germany was a semi stable democracy that was no danger to her
neighbors.
No one really believe she would be a danger again.
Over the next ten years she build up her airforce and army to the point
that by 1940 she had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France,
Belgium and the Netherlands.
Back then a fighter or tank could be designed and produced in under a
year.
To suggest that any country can do that now is absurd.


in 1930 everybody was mired in a worldwide depression. england and france
were bankrupt.
the situation is not at all analogous. and germany was a concievable enemy.

The world believed Germany was neutered after the end of WW1

and the fact is the allies didn't lack better weapons than the germans.
hurricanes and DW520s were capable and the spitfire maybe better than the
ME109.

The argument can go round and round but thte fact is Germany rebuilt her
military over the short ten year period.
The same length of time you think we would have as a warning now.

british tanks had better armour and french tanks had better armour and
bigger guns.

A minscual number of British tanks were better armored than German
tanks.


you are carrying on like we are defenseless and falling behind.

Hardly, I am countering your arguments with the facts of the time.



and you also refuse to acknowledge the fact we are embroiled in 2 wars that
are straining the economy and which show no sign of ending anytime soon. .
we just can't keep spending on things that aren't needed now,

You should pay attention better.
Iraq shows every sign of being resolved.
And if Obama wins and actually does as he claims then within a year we
will be out of Iraq (except for forces to guard US interests, train the
Iraqi's and chase terrorists, Sen Obama's words not mine)



--

"Oh Norman, listen! The loons are calling!"
- Katherine Hepburn, "On Golden Pond"

In article , Zomby-
says...
On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:16:45 -0700, tankfixer
wrote:

In article , raymond-
says...

"tankfixer" wrote in message
...
In article , raymond-
says...

are they just going to magically appear in 10 years, full blown, armed to
the teeth with ultra-fighters?

Yes.

Example: German 1930 to 1940.


the germans didn't have the best stuff. and there was plenty of warning.
the french built the maginot linebefore the german threat was known.
you want to do the same today.
we started then too.
the u.s. built a tank factory and it was producing tanks in less than a
year.

In 1930 Germany was a semi stable democracy that was no danger to her
neighbors.
No one really believe she would be a danger again.
Over the next ten years she build up her airforce and army to the point
that by 1940 she had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France,
Belgium and the Netherlands.
Back then a fighter or tank could be designed and produced in under a
year.
To suggest that any country can do that now is absurd.

Did you mean CAN or Can't.

I think its unlikely any country can go from idea to production in a
year like happened in WW2


Given enough resources an awful lot can be accomplished. We take an
awful long time doing things right now over all sorts of debates over
money.

One thing that happens now is the constant tinkering with the design.
Lengthens the design and prototype cycle excessivly.


In another scrape for survival I think the US could do a whole bunch
of things very quickly, although we would have to ramp up a lot of our
manufacturing capability first though, or out-source the actual
building to the Chinese or somebody.





--

"Oh Norman, listen! The loons are calling!"
- Katherine Hepburn, "On Golden Pond"

On Jun 15, 2:42*am, Ian B MacLure wrote:
Typhoon502 wrote in news:4865a85c-f12a-4e51-8290-
:

* * * * [snip]

And to make an aside on the Venezuelan threat scenario, I'm not
entirely confident that the F-15Cs would fight at a parity level with
Su-30s, especially with the latest Russian AAMs. The Eagle drivers
might just find themselves in a sticky situation.

* * * * Assuming of course there were any SU-30s still operational
* * * * when the Eagles showed up.

I reference both the Korean and Vietnam wars where the supposedly
backwards two-bit dictatorships had Russian pilots and maintenance
crews flying top-line equipment for them. Do you think that Chavez
would absolutely refuse to have Russian "advisors" back his power play
if he could get them?

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:36:25 -0400, "Raymond O'Hara"
wrote:

Hell Right now the Pakistaini's & our Nato allies wish we learn to shoot
only the enemy. The Guys in the clouds are ****ing off the friendlies
Again based on yesterdays news.

every army has friendly fire incidents, even the pakis and our nato allies.
its just a way to america bash.

No - when the Canadians had 4 dead and 8 wounded at American hands in
Afghanistan, your president made 5 public appearances later that day
and didn't mention the incident in any of them.

I think Canadians generally are bright enough to know that in war sh**
happens but Dubya had no fewer than 5 opportunities to say something
like "we have some bad news from Afghanistan and the United States is
very sorry..." or something minimal to that effect. That he DIDN'T
choose to take one of his 5 chances to say something like that
suggests the ally is taken for granted.

Had the roles been reversed and Canadian aircraft killed US troops you
can be sure that both Americans would be PO'd and that the Canadian
Prime Minister would say something. Had somehow our prime minister NOT
said something like that Americans would be furious and rightly so.

That's not America-bashing - that's how allies treat allies.

Airyx wrote:
[snip]


Other potential adversaries with strong air capabilities are China
(conflicts with India, Vietnam, Phillipeans, Taiwan), and Venezuala
(conflicts will all of their neighbors).

Britain may have a defence agreement with Venezuala's neighbour Gyana.

Andrew Swallow

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:27:54 -0700, Mike Williamson
wrote:



Are you suggesting that the US lease these light aircraft from their
current owners (the method by which the "section patrol craft" were
entered into Naval Service)?

That's one way. The other is just to exercise eminent domain and pay them
off in the event of a war. The neat thing about this particular deal is
that you have a large pool of pilots who are experienced in the operation
of the type that can be brought in and given training in such things as
weapons delivery. That really speeds things up.


Aircraft such as you describe would not have the payload capacity
to carry a useful armament or the fuel for a useful time on station.

Not true. First off, you can base these close to the FEBA, (Forward Edge
of Battle Area) and they don't require a nice, long visible concrete
landing strip. Any ploughed field will do. And as for useful armament,
that's not entirely true either. Carl Gustav Von Rosen did a fine job of
making monkeys out of the British and East German pilots his little
squadron was up against, and in the Balkans, an amazing array of aircraft
to include crop dusters, were modified for air strikes and did fairly well.

And there are a variety of very effective weapons that these can carry,
like small CBU bomblets, antitank bombs, napalm or other incendaries,
rockets, and there's nothing stopping you from building them so that they
could carry Hellfire or other small precision guided munitions. If a small
UAV can carry it, there's no reason why our vest pocket TACAIR asset can't.
And I've been doing some initial work on what I guess you'd call a
universal weapons adaptor box. Instead of a separate black box and wiring
harness for every missile you can hang on the pylon, I've been doping out
an idea for a sort of military USB plug so that when the weapons delivery
computer gets started, it downloads the firing & interface data it needs
from a ROM chip on the missile. Then you deliver according to what you've
got on the pylon, with no special wiring or added black boxes. I sort of
got the idea from when the Brits were modifying GR MK 3 Harriers to carry
Sidewinders, which required additional wiring. It was a great
improvisation, but they shouldn't have had to do it, and the thing that
scares me here is that nobody seems to have learned from the experience.

The missile makers won't like it, because a universal weapons adaptor
will eat into revenue for all of those extra black boxes and all of the
tech reps and special instrument racks that you need to maintain and
troubleshoot them, but plug & play in precision guided weapons is an idea
whose time has come.

Either way though, a modified Sport Light operating at the Brigade level
near the FEBA will have plenty of loiter time, fast turnaround times and
some fairly effective weapons that they can carry and use. And best of
all, you get to skip all of the Air Force bureaucracy when you want to put
hot iron on a target someplace, and best of all, being an Army asset, we
could build them so that their radio will directly communicate with the
VRC-77s in my old tank, which is a really nice feature, because air
support requests don't have to go through two dozen people just to get
aircraft tasked, let alone have em show up when and where you need em.
Keep in mind that these aren't like an old Phantom II squadron where you
have a battalion sized organization or larger supporting eight airplanes..
There is no reason that a light Aeroweapons Company couldn't operate 22
light attack planes with a company sized TO&E. (When I was doing my
original research, I took the logistic footprint of an Army tank company
equipped with M-60A1 (RISE) to define the logistical constraints. The
complexity of the weapons in question is comparable, with the planes
actually being somewhat simpler.)

A Hellfire missile (used aboard the Predator, for instance) weighs
99 pounds, plus the equipment necessary to mount it, target it, fire
it, etc (cost, probably several hundred thousand dollars). This is
probably the smallest guided missile weapon you will find. A small
diameter bomb (a "low-collateral-damage" weapon) weighs in at 250
pounds. But travelling at 100 kts or so, and flying
at a couple thousand feet, you have to fly just about directly over
the target to hit it with a bomb.

We can do it better than that. My proposal for a universal weapons
adaptor box is one way. And that thing would use COTS, (Commercial Off The
Shelf) components and a Linux based operating system. The military USB bus
would use software based on Hotplug, which handles plug & play USB devices.

I'm looking at a system that won't weigh more than ten pounds. And that's
do-able with COTS components. And with some of the stuff we can do with
graphite epoxy, I can get weights for weapons pylons down and maybe a lot.
And keep in mind that we could use TOW-2s as well. The new ones aren't
wire guided and we can use tech developed in previous programs to give the
missiles millimeter wave seekers and a rom chip based target
identification library. There's plenty of room in the missile for that.

Just because we always did it one way, doesn't mean that we can't
do better. And keep in mind that the plane is designed at the outset to be
able to adapted for ground support including external weapons carriage at
the outset.

And you can do accurate bombing even with a reflector type weapons site..
Back during the Korean War, the Marines were asked whether they preferred
jet or propeller driven close air support and to a man they preferred the
older Corsairs. Why? Because they could come in low and slow and put the
ordinance where the ground troops wanted it. And the reflector sights were
all that the pilots had and they did fine.


There is precident for this. Count Carl Gustav Von Rosen operated
with planes like these in the Biafran Civil War and did quite well
with them. The CIA was attacking Nicaraguan oil facilities for a time
using similar aircraft.
And with the development of some of the new diesel aircraft
engines, the options for tactical employment are greatly improved.
The pilots skills one gets from a Sport Pilot certificate, roughly
is equivalent to the skills of a Huey or Aircobra pilot from Vietnam
who was carrying a TAC Ticket, if one excludes weapons delivery.

I'll have to ask for some documentation on this. The FAA requires a
total of only 20 hours flying instruction for a 'Sport Pilot' ticket-
are you saying that military helicopter pilots only required 20 hours
of training in the late 1960's? Note that a sport pilot can only
carry one passenger (indeed, can not fly an aircraft capable of
carrying more than one passenger in addition to the pilot), can only
fly in Day, VFR conditions in certain airspace, and is not even
considered capable of flying "for hire." Heck, a simple private pilot's
license requires twice the flying training, and I guarantee you a
private pilot would not be qualified to carry out the missions you
suggest.

A helicopter requires more time, but I can take a twenty hour pilot, give
him around fifty more hours plus ground training and he could do this.

A Tac ticket was VFR only and was a short course. Flight lead tended to
be guys with an IFR rating but not always. The big difference is in being
able to fly with a topographic map rather than an FAA style sectional.
Terrain is important in weapons delivery in support of line troops.

We'd have to tweak the Sport Pilot regulations a bit, but there are valid
national security reasons for doing so. The FAA was mostly concerned with
the amount of damage a plane crash would do if a pilot screwed up. They
still tend to operate like their primary job is protecting Juan Trippe's
investors. That's got to change. The Canadian ultralight regulations are a
little bit better in this regard.

And keep in mind that we're not talking about commercial pilots or people
with a private pilots' license operating in Chicago O'Hare's pattern or
any of that kind of nonsense. We're talking about taking sport pilots and
converting them into ground support pilots able to take a low and slow
airplane and use it for things like support of troops in contact, Bed
Check Charlie raids, patrol of lines of communication, and limited
interdiction, and those guys have enough training that if we added the
tactics, some more emphasis on map reading and terrain orientation from an
airplane and weapons delivery, they could do this. The two biggest things
are terrain orientation and weapons delivery. But we can teach that. The
Army's good at it.

Keep in mind that these planes are intended to let you do your job with
your head out of the cockpit and systems management is a minimal
requirement, compared to say, what it was in an old F-105D flying a
nuclear delivery mission out of Turkey. You're not going to be staging out
of Italy, flying nine hours and then waiting for a Combat Controller to
give you a target like you do in Afghanistan. These planes won't be much
farther back than where you keep the medium artillery. They'll be
operating off of old washboard roads and ploughed fields, not airstrips.
They'll be a field weapon, and assumptions from operating jet aircraft in
a TACAIR environment don't really apply.

Such planes, if designed for rough field use, could provide several
Army Brigades, with a couple of Aeroweapons Companies, say, with
twenty aircraft a piece and the necessary support organization, for
very little.

The planes could be designed for air delivery, truck transport, or
going back to Operation Torch, launch from Escort and Merchant
aircraft carriers with the intention of having them land at airstrips
in the lodgement area of an amphibious operation to provide TACAIR for
troops thereon.
They could also function as FACs, light air support for air
rescue, patrol of lines of communication, ect. In short, they'd be
useful. Not the glamorous jets that one usually thinks of, but very,
very useful nonetheless.
And at twelve grand a pop, they'd be dirt cheap.

I don't believe they'd be "very, very useful." At best, they
might be "not quite useless." They don't seem capable of performing
any of the missions listed. Heck, in some cases, you are suggesting
a or scenario for which there is no requirement, i.e. replaying Torch.
First, there aren't any "escort or merchant aircraft carriers." There
are ships with helipads, for which you use helicopters, which are
already in the inventory and which are much more capable.

Being an ex-ground soldier and knowing the limitations of support of
troops in contact when you're dealing with jets, I strongly disagree.
Being an ex-Tanker, I'm looking at this from a user angle. And most
support jobs require a little ordinance at the right time in the right
place, and these planes can do that. There are a lot of situations where a
light plane with smaller ordinance can get you better effect than calling
up the Howitzer Battery and asking for a battery three and screwing around
with adjusting fire, when one guy who can eyeball the target and put a
rocket on it, will do it faster and better.

I know the circumstances and the targets and the effects of existing
weapons and I know what these planes would be able to do, and I think that
they'd work quite well and be more available and cheaper to operate than
the helicopters that we're forced to rely on because of the 1947 Key West
Agreement.

And that Torch scenario is more likely than you think. Ever heard of the
Vickers Containerised Weapons Fit? It was a proposal in the 70's for
producing sea control ships and auxilliary cruisers and escorts by
installing modification kits on containerships. And containerships are the
most common and cheapest to operate merchant hulls in the world. Decking
one so that it could launch and even recover light planes can be done in
days. Most of the containerized modules needed to turn it into a working
merchant aircraft carrier can be built cheaply, stored indefinitely and
assembled at need. I suspect that the Chinese are doing this for some of
their COSCO assets too, since it expands their capabilities and is cheap
to do and because it makes sense given what they want and need to do.

Look at Afghanistan and Iraq and our biggest problems come from the fact
that our logistics are weak and our weapons are set up assuming
prepositioned stocks rather than deployable assets. And that means that
our ability to intervene and the time in which we can do so, are severely
circumscribed. Light planes and converted containership hulls will do a
lot to get around that. And with a shrinking military, less money to spend
and a more hostile world than it used to be, prepositioning isn't all that
valid of a logistical solution anymore, which means that the real
transformation in military affairs is less about weird electronics weapons
than it is about a shift from prepositioned assets to ones that can be
deployed in a timely manner. It does you no good to use the most expensive
and complex weapons in the world if you can't get them to where you need
them and keep them operational in the field. The next war, we're not gonna
be able to do like we did in Gulf Wars One and Two by using controlled
cannibalization of assets in CONUS to provide a stream of replacement
circut boards and the like. Our Air Force is getting too small for us to
get away with that. (Remember that story of Burton's about that F-111D
Confidence mission where only five planes made it to Australia and they
were only kept operating by grounding every F-111D in CONUS? I don't know
about you, but I found that one embarassing, and yet we don't seem to be
changing any.)

Light support for Air Rescue (I take it this is for Combat Search
and Rescue (CSAR))?

Yup. For guys who get hit while delivering support to troops in contact
and on limited interdiction missions. There it's a matter of how fast you
can get help in, and a guy with even light weapons who can keep the other
guys heads down, is better now, than a pair of Warthogs and an MH-60 a
half hour down the road. The longer you take, the more stuff you've got to
have, so doing things fast is better than waiting around.


Suppressing enemy fires in an area to allow forces to carry out the
rescue has proven to be a project best equipped with a fairly large
amount of available firepower- A-10's are currently considered quite
useful for this work. In addition to a long loiter time, they typically
carry a variety of ordnance that individually weigh as much or more than
the aircraft you are proposing. They are also fast enough to get to the
target area *before* the rescue equipment. Showing up with the
rescue forces isn't a good way to accomplish this, as they then have
to "hang around" in bad-guy territory while you sanitize the landing
area. If someone shows up first to do this, then your light support
is not required. Also, sanitizing the area of bad guys in a small,
lightly armed and armored aircraft is a good way of maximizing your
rescue bird's effectiveness, because they will probably have to
rescue your light support aircraft's pilot too, when they arrive,
if the bad guys are present in any force (such as, for instance, the
force required to cause the CSAR event in the first place).

If you've got time, and you've got the A-10s and the heavier stuff. My
assumption is that more of our wars are going to resemble Task Force Smith
type situations than anything else, which means that having the big stuff
is nice, but odds on you won't have it. Remember that little situation in
Mogadishu? Small, light elements are more likely to be okayed by
politicians than big heavy ones.

Everything I do, is predicated on the idea that faster is better and that
a pickup game is going to do more good than a carefully layed on operation
will later. And done right, I don't think that the risk will be undue.
Keep in mind that there are some awesome weapons out there that aren't
very big, like Dillon Aero's M145D gatling gun. Also keep in mind that
these planes are flying close to the FEBA. They're within artillery range
and in range of other supporting weapons as well. Working together, you
can raise merry hell with that stuff. That pilot doesn't just have what
he's got on the airplane. He's got everything that the Brigade has that
can shoot at his disposal, and that's like waking up to the Wrath of God
on a particularly bad day. So if he gets low on ammo, he can hand off to
the mortar sections of whatever Cavalry Squadron or Combat Support Company
is nearby, he's got the Howitzer Battery, he's got direct fire weapons of
the Brigade, and all of that comes down like a ton of bricks if you're on
the recieving end. Even the old Four Duce, (106mm mortar) is actually
pretty awesome when you figure that it carries as much explosive as a
155mm howitzer round and we've replaced the old mortars with a really
nice, and very, very accurate, 120mm that'll ruin your day if you're on
the recieving end.

And in addition to high explosives and hot steel, there's something else
that the Brigade can do for those pilots. Smoke! Kinda hard to screw with
the guys doing the rescue when somebody's just dumped a smokescreen on top
of them. Makes target acquisition, to put it crudely, a cast iron bitch.
And we Army guys have a tendency to look after our own, so those pilots
have a lot of on call support that the Air Force guys can't get because
they can't talk to the guy in the tank--me!

Those little planes may be small, and they may be crude by jet driver
standards, but they're no more and probably a good deal less vulnerable
than the old Hueys and Snakes were during Vietnam, but they can deliver
what's needed when it's needed, they've got plenty of backup that they can
call, and there's a whole lot less to go wrong with them than there is in
all of that modern turbine technology that looks good in the showroom but
which packs up all too much when it gets out where the shooting's actually
taking place.


Patrolling lines of communications

Actually useful during an insurgency. The trouble is, your insurgents
will probably be doing their mischief during the night or in bad
weather. Your sport pilot isn't actually qualified to fly in either,
and at $12,000 your aircraft won't be equipped for it any way.

Useful in general warfare. Our enemies have made close studies of the
partisan operations on the Russian Front and we can expect diversionary
troop attacks against lines of communication targets during a war. The
Chinese are really big on the idea.

As far as equipping those planes go, we can equip a percentage of them
and train some of the better pilots for that. In Vietnam, our Army
Aviation Assets had a mix of pilots with IFR training and pilots with Tac
Tickets and there was a concerted effort to upgrade their training in
theater as time and resources permitted. There's no reason to think that
we can't operate that way again.

And lest we forget history, good old Bed Check Charlie and the Russian
Night Witches who were their predecessors, operated in planes that not
only didn't have IFR gear, but they did it in weather that would shut our
Air Force down. (Not to mention doing it in PO-2 biplanes, which had to be
miserable.) We can do better than that, without having to go to an Air
Force level of complexity. In real wars where the bureaucrats are kept at
bay, you'd be amazed at just how inventive our guys can get.

And we can do it with a $12,000.00 airplane.


You also seem woefully ignorant about the entire concept of joint
operations.

No, actually I don't think that joint operations are all they're
cracked up to be. For example, in Afghanistan, the Air Force told the
Army that they couldn't even deliver towed artillery and that all
heavy weapons support would have to come from the air. That's okay
until weather goes below Air Force weather minimums like they did
during Operation Anaconda, when the Air Force called the game and the
troops on the mountain had nothing heavier than 81mm mortars for
support. Artillery is an all weather weapon, but the Air Force would
neither deliver, nor support it.

At least towed artillery and light planes would belong to the
Army commander and he could operate them as the situation dictated
without having to worry about what REMFs in some rear line Air Force
billet thought about it.

Towed artillery DOES belong to the Army, and so does the helicopter
airlift used to move it to a tactical location. The inability
to put towed artillery into place was not a problem with "some rear line
Air Force billet," as you so quaintly call it- it was due to the
inability of helicopters to carry heavy equipment to the high
altitudes required for Operation Anaconda. That makes it a problem
with the Army transportation system, not the Air Force. The Air Force
therefore didn't tell the Army that all heavy support would be from
the Air- the Army told the Air Force that (and, given typical
cross-service planning and communications, probably occurred about
the time the troops boarding their helicopters for the operation
to begin).

The Air Force wouldn't even bring them in to Bagram, and that
on airlift assets that are allegedly supposed to be able to operate on
rough fields. Theater and Intertheater airlift is tasked to the Air Force,
and the last time the Army tried it, the Air Force delivered a massive
blizzard of crap that resulted in the Army giving up it's Caribous to the
Air Force, who in turn promptly sent them to the Boneyard. And every time
it gets mentioned,
the Air Force waves the Key West Agreement like a bloody red flag and
screams, "Roles & Missions."

And in the case of the 82nd's 105mms, when they can't be moved in one
piece, they can be moved in pieces and assembled on site. The Artillery
guys know how to do that and they're good at it. If the Air Force had
delivered to
Bagram, they'd have had them. Bet the rent on it.

If the tubes had been in-country, the Army would have gotten them where
they needed to go, but unfortunately, the Air Force stated that they
couldn't get the guns to Bagram. And the Army doesn't control that ALOC or
the assets that move material along it. The Air Force does.

And what you're not factoring in, is that the enemy doesn't wait for
weather or for the Air Force to get their ducks in a row. When they move,
the Army has to move and weather minimums be damned. That means that the
troops had to be on that hill and they had to have support, and as usual,
the Blue Suits in Italy were a day late and a dollar short.

Part of being able to win in a war is to have a shorter OODA loop than
the other guy does, and that means being able to move when you have to and
the Air Force for both technical and bureaucratic reasons can't. And that
means missing opportunites that we shouldn't. Giving the Army a field
deployable organic light air support capability, goes a long way towards
rectifying that dismal state of affairs.


Actually, reading an analysis of the planning and coordination
involved, it probably wasn't mentioned even then-after all,
the US Navy, scheduled to supply most of the tactical air
(fighter-bomber) support, wasn't even told the date it would
start, and as a result had the carrier Stennis stand down flying
operations on the first day. See-

http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTR...c=GetTRDoc.pdf

That's another problem. And that's why the Army needs an organic
capability that is an asset in the Brigade Commander's tool box. Having to
deal with things a thousand miles away when your S2, (Intelligence
Officer) tells you that you've gotta move now, is a great recipie for a
disaster. The Navy problem in that operation just underscores the point.


As for weather minimums, you seem to think that they were created
arbitrarily by some Air Force guy because he had nothing better to
do. If the weather is "below minimums," it generally means that it
is not POSSIBLE to deliver ordnance on target accurately- target
identification and engagement in close proximity to friendly forces
is hazardous enough already, you want to make it more likely that
friendly forces are hit? Remember, without a visual talley on a
target, the only weapon that can be delivered by an Air Force
aircraft is a JDAM. This requires precise coordinates from the
ground controller (which will itself likely be handicapped by
weather). If you want a platform that can get under (much of)
the weather and engage in close proximity to friendly troops
in such circumstances, then you are looking for a helicopter-
and shockingly enough, the Army has those for that precise
purpose. As organic assets, they are also more readily available
at the local level (they are NOT available to the division next door,
who may well have a greater need for them, but that is what
you get from organic assets and decentralized control).

I'd rather have the guy who's in the mud deciding some of
that rather than some guy in a soft chair in Italy. It's probably
gonna come as a shock, but most guys who've done the Forward Observer's
Course and who've had basic FAC training are pretty good at estimating
weather. Then again, we live in it. And we've got some pretty remarkable
means of targetting too. If we can see it, we can kill it, and these days,
we've got thermal imaging gear that lets us see just about anything.

The Artillery guys have a neat toy. They've got a gadget that lets you
set up, take a GPS ping, put the optical sight on the target, either ping
with a laser ranger or punch in an estimate, and it'll compute the offset
and send it directly to a fire direction center. From there, they've got
other gadgets that will figure elevation, charge, allow for earth's
rotation and drop rounds just about anyplace that you like it. It's
getting to be where they can fire for effect without a lot of sensing and
adjusting fire from the Forward Observer. And this gear is getting more
and more common.

Now there's nothing that says that we can't build a little box like the
transponder that the Marines used to tell the A-6 pilots where you were,
so that they could guide off of you and hit what you designated under
cloud cover. And GPS makes that thing pretty precise these days.

We've got 250 pound GPS bombs and they're getting smaller, so there's no
reason why the planes couldn't bomb accurately without ever seeing the
target, as long as the electronics are working. Or, given that thermal
sights are getting small enough to hang on a rifle now, (big difference
from the Thermal Imaging Sight prototype I got to try out at the Armor
Engineering Test Board back in 77, that required an M-60A1 to carry it),
so there's no reason that I couldn't put SMOKE, (White Phosporus) on a
target and have the plane bomb on that.

In short, it ain't like the old days. Weather minimums for jets are
understandible because they move fast and don't want to be smeared all
over the side of a mountain, but an armed 100mph light plane can operate
in the kind of light soup that a jet can't, with the right gear. And if
it's cheap enough to festoon the grunts with it, it's cheap enough for our
little airplanes.)

Your arguements here appear to be based on a profound misunderstanding
of the issues and circumstances, as well as a bias against the Air
Force.

Nope. They're based on a study of history as well as being a former Tank
Commander who's had the fun experience of sitting on a range and watching
a pair of F-111s come screaming in and miss the entire range by two miles.

In the wars to come, the old chess game model is out. Look at it this
way. Imagine a basketball game where it's played between one guy who has
to dictate the moves to all of his players and a regular basketball team
who know the game, have worked together and know what the goal is and can
work accordingly. The way the Air Force plays it, it's like that guy
trying to move players like they're chess pieces. And it doesn't work
anymore.

You've got to operate in such a way as to give your enemies a maximum
amount of uncertainty and you've got to be fast and agile enough to react
quickly to changes and opportunities while constantly reassessing and
changing how you go about doing what you do. Boyd's OODA loop.

The way that the Air Force wants to operate, we can't do that and no
amount of crap about net centric warfare is gonna change the fact that our
tendency towards long chains of command, lousy interoperability and loads
of bureaucracy, cedes points to the enemy. We could get away with that
when we were bigger than everybody else and could outmuscle everybody, but
now we can't, which means that we've got to substitute brains for mass and
come up with the most compact and responsive structures that we can.

Our future wars are going to resemble Task Force Smith, in all it's
horror more than it's gonna resemble WW-II or the Soviet Debauch into
Fulda Gap that I trained for and fortunately never had to do. Nathan
Bedford Forrest's old adage of getting there first with the most, is gonna
be a watchword, which means that you've got to have deployable assets and
really shorts lines of communication and control and that means that
you're going to have to operate in small specified commands, (Like a
brigade!) that have a mission, identity, assets and a common command
structure, rather than the kind of unified command nonsense that the Air
Force likes that should have been thoroughly discredited when it failed so
badly in Grenada. It's gotta be a team effort, not the kind of chessgame
crap that you get right now with competing hostile bureaucracies that
don't play well together.

Our guys are gonna have to move fast, be agile enough to change according
to changes in the situation and to do so well enough to dominate it, and
to perpetually keep the enemy on the horns of Sherman's dilemma. The
current setup won't do that, and we know that because it never, ever has
done so successfully. The old British Rail Task Force has got to become an
American game, even if some of the players don't like it.

I'm not hostile to the Air Force, so much as I am hostile to bureaucracy
and military policy thats based on the most solipsistic assumptions I've
ever seen. When you take a skeptical look at the whole thing, what you
find is that most of what we propose to do, depends on the enemy being
compliant enough to play by our rules, and that's not likely to happen
anymore. Stuff like the Maxwell AFB Battlespace Dominance concept is
mostly warmed over Douhetism, and the current avoidance of Boyd's Manouver
Warfare concepts are gonna get people killed and lose us wars. SO it seems
reasonable to me that it's not unreasonable to argue forcefully for
changing it. We're not gonna get the wars that we want to fight, we're
gonna get the wars that we're stuck fighting, and we need to deal with
that.

"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:40:38 -0700, eatfastnoodle
wrote:

On Jun 15, 12:34Â*pm, "Michael Shirley" wrote:
On Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:52:15 -0700, Tiger
wrote:
Hell Right now the Pakistaini's & our Nato allies wish we learn to
shoot Â*
only the enemy. The Guys in the clouds are ****ing off the friendlies
Â*
Again based on yesterdays news.

Â* Â* Â* Â* I'm not so sure I'd call Pakistan an ally. They're closer to
the Chinese Â*
as members of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization and a lot closer
still Â*
in joint weapons programs to them, than they are us. I'd term our Â*
relationship more of a shotgun marriage with them doing the bare
minimum Â*
to not have Washington just set up a black ops squadron and just go
flying Â*
strike and interdiction missions in Waziristan that would cause extreme
Â*
embarassment to the Pakistanis.
--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"--
Admiral Â*
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.

Pakistan isn't a member of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization. And
given the history of them being betrayed by the US and left in the
dust after they committed significant resources to some of the most
important US operations, it's hard their blame to not trust the US.
Remember Afghanistan, the second after Soviet Union withdrew,
Pakistan was dumped by the US and US refused to deliver multiple F16s
already paid by Pakistan and no refund was offered. How can anybody
trust you after you committed such a blatant betray and acted as if
you were a con-artist.(People with a half ounce of integrity would at
least return the money if you couldn't deliver the plane for whatever
reason).

Look at their defense agreements, military history and joint defense
programs, to include that nice new port the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy's
building there. China and Pakistan are closer to each other than the US
and Germany was in the Cold War. And if you look closely at that, what you
see is that they're defacto members of SCO. And any professional order of
battle in that coalition will include Pakistan in China's column, not ours.

As far as doublecrossing them, I agree. Washington doublescrosses
everybody. One of the problems with being as big as we are, and having
decision cycles predicated on the news cycle, the fundraising cycle and
election cycles, is that it makes for a government that has a rather short
range view of things. That's bad, and it's going to bite us, and arguably,
it is biting us. That's what we get for having a political structure
composed of people who believe that it's possible to act without
consequences. Welcome to the real world.

It's one of the reasons that I'm absolutely opposed to handing over the
Kurds to Baghdad. We've doublecrossed em twice that I can remember and I'd
just as soon leave things in working order there, than to hand the whole
mess over to the first pimp that takes a State Department employee to
lunch.

From my view though, it's not a matter of why our friends are fast
becoming our enemies. We're agreed on that point. My point of view has to
do with maintaining the national security interests of the United States
in a world where our politicians have created the classiest pack of
enemies that anybody could ever want, leaving us to deal with them if we
can.

And that means some fundamental changes to how we approach things,
starting with the Middle East. We can't afford sideshows in sandtrap wars,
period. Our capabilities have shrunken too much. Our industrial base is
short, our logistics are lousy, (the only reason that Desert Storm was
possible was because the British Merchant Navy provided critical sealift)
our military overdepends on boutique weapons that we can neither procure
consistantly in useful numbers or replace when they are destroyed. In
short, we've got a mess.

I'm not gonna argue the point about how we got into the mess that we're
in. That's obvious, even to a Senator. Chuckle I'm not gonna argue that
we've made some implacably deadly enemies, starting with the old Weiqi
players in Beijing. That much is as obvious as a corpse floating in the
pool.

No, my point is that having made all of these enemies, we must survive
having done so, and that means some major shifts in how we base and use
our military assets, and the Middle East, is a luxury right now that we
can ill afford, so I'm all for cutting our losses, letting Europe deal
with their own security issues and shifting our focus to the Carribean,
the Pacific and our Southern Border, where we've got some critical and
potentially lethal problems.




--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.