{"id":37146,"date":"2013-08-19T02:08:21","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T06:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=37146"},"modified":"2013-08-19T02:08:21","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T06:08:21","slug":"newer-is-not-always-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=37146","title":{"rendered":"Newer is not always better"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen a lot of interesting things being posted about the F-35, the DoD’s newest wiz-bang be-all kill-all fighter, designed to replace the AV-8B Harrier, A-10 Warthog, F-16 Falcon, and the F-18 Hornet.\u00a0 Most of the articles I’ve seen suggest that the F-35 is more Dud<\/a>, than High speed death machine.\u00a0 It seems that if anyone dies because of the F-35 it might well be our own pilots.\u00a0 As if that wasn’t bad enough, now we have a senator saying the A-10’s will be gone inside of a year<\/a>.\u00a0 Scared yet?\u00a0 It seems that everyone is convinced that Drones, and high flying stealthy machines are the winning ticket.\u00a0 I have yet to see any literature or opinions that say that the F-35 is anything more than a disaster waiting to happen.<\/p>\n

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Now let’s look at the A-10 alone, and it becomes painfully clear that this move is not only boneheaded but highly dangerous.\u00a0 Take this article<\/a>, which says that the F-35 could not possibly fly as many sorties as the A-10.\u00a0 Even the B model which is supposed to be a V\/STOL variant, couldn’t keep up.\u00a0 I’m not an aircraft expert but I can bet that even if they did manage that kind of turn around, there’s no way that the F-35 could carry the awesome array of bombs, or air to ground missiles.\u00a0 One of the other selling points of the A-10 is how it uses relatively less fuel when compared to most jet aircraft which gives it both range and loiter ability that the supersonic F-35 never could match.<\/p>\n

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But this article<\/a>, is perhaps one of the most damming of all.\u00a0 It tells the tale of US troops in contact, in Afghanistan, in danger of being overrun.\u00a0 The A-10’s managed to keep the enemy at bay, and used up a lot of ammo in the process.\u00a0 Ammo that the F-35 could never ever<\/em> match.\u00a0 The reason is pretty simple.\u00a0 The A-10 doesn’t need to be stealthy.\u00a0 It doesn’t need to fight Migs or go supersonic.\u00a0 In fact going low and slow is exactly what it’s designed to do.\u00a0 The A-10 is really the only<\/em> airframe in our arsenal that is designed solely<\/em> for close air support.\u00a0 It is designed to kill tanks and ground troops in prodigious numbers.\u00a0 If anyone recalls Desert Storm, the A-10 earned the nickname “Whistling Death” as they tore up whole battalions of enemy troops and tanks at a time.<\/p>\n

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In my own personal experience, when I first arrived at FOB Warrior (Kirkuk Air Base) there was an A-10 squadron stationed there.\u00a0 They would run regular patrols all over Northern Iraq.\u00a0 I only heard of one instance when the A-10’s were actually called in, but one of the things I liked most about them was that they were quiet<\/em>.\u00a0 You really wouldn’t hear them unless they’re almost on top of you, and I actually got sleep being at the end of the runway.\u00a0 A few months in the A-10’s were replaced by the “sexier” F-16’s.\u00a0 You could tell the difference immediately.\u00a0 As cool as it is when you see an F-16 do a max power take off the first time, I got almost no sleep because those suckers are\u00a0loud<\/em>.\u00a0 More than that, you could tell when they were overhead.\u00a0 You could hear them and point out their general direction when they were\u00a0miles<\/em> away.\u00a0 Generally speaking, this is not<\/em> a good thing in a ground attack fighter.\u00a0 You don’t want the enemy to know they’re about to get corn cobbed until it’s too late.\u00a0 That’s actually one of the few good things about a predator drone, you simply don’t know its there until it’s too late.<\/p>\n

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Another point where the F-35 fails, is ruggedness.\u00a0 I don’t care how cool the new stealth fighters are, they can’t hold a candle to the A-10.\u00a0 There are several really great pictures of A-10’s that made it back to base with their tail practically shot off.\u00a0 They’re even designed so that if an engine explodes it won’t damage the avionics.\u00a0 I would seriously doubt that any officer in command of an\u00a0 F-35 unit would allow any of his or her pilots to descend low enough to actually pick up anti air fire, let alone strafe targets on the ground.\u00a0 If they did, in some hypothetical situation, how much damage could the highly sophisticated craft really<\/em> take.\u00a0 Even the mainstay fighters like the F-15 and F-16 don’t take well to AA fire.\u00a0 Clearly someone has forgotten in order to preform the CAS mission you have to go low enough to hit the enemy, but when you’re that low, the enemy can hit you too.<\/p>\n

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So why the emphasis?\u00a0 Why the urgency?\u00a0 Well Sequester has some of the blame, but in truth the AF has an institutional bad habit of favoring the shiniest new toys designed to fight in a futuristic world, the strangely never seems to happen.\u00a0 The F-104 Starfighter is a great example.\u00a0 It’s a good thing that it was never actually used to fight a war, because it had a nasty habit of killing pilots just trying to land the damn thing.\u00a0 The F-4 Phantom, originally a Navy project, was supposed to prove that a gun was no longer needed for areal combat.\u00a0 Instead, the F-4 proved conclusively that a gun was<\/em> needed on fighter aircraft.\u00a0 The Stealth technology of the F-117, and B-2 is also another great example it’s supposed to be the ultimate, but we’ve seen examples of both airframes with extreme vulnerability.\u00a0 As awesome as the nighthawks were, they were also extremely vulnerable, one even getting shot down in Kosovo.\u00a0 As far as the B-2 Spirit, each one costs roughly the same as a Ticonderoga class cruiser, and while we’ve certainly gotten our money’s worth out of them, a few years ago one of the bombers (we only had 21) crashed because of\u00a0water droplets<\/em> on one of the sensors.<\/p>\n

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The Air Force, is full of egg heads, that love to have the coolest toys.\u00a0 While no one can argue that’s a pretty human trait, where the Air Force goes wrong is that they forget their sole purpose is to win wars, not look cool doing it.\u00a0 We could have arguments as to the risk aversion in CAS missions, and to be fair risk aversion is a problem every service is having right now, but the plain truth is that we still need the A-10.\u00a0 Despite all the warm fuzzies that the services and Lockeed have been putting out about the F-35, every time I hear about it I get a cold chill go down my spine.\u00a0 I think the rush to get the latest toy, that can do every mission asked of it (many of those missions with wildly different mission requirements) will leave us vulnerable, and quite possibly get a lot of good people killed.\u00a0 Of course by the time we figure that out it will be far too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen a lot of interesting things being posted about the F-35, the DoD’s newest wiz-bang … Newer is not always better<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}