It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
Comment of the week goes to doctorpat, who suggests getting the albatross of the A-10 off the Air Force's back by donating them to Ukraine.
In other news, the HASC has finished its markup of the FY2023 NDAA, and as I predicted, a lot of the cuts have been reversed. Rather than buying 8 ships and retiring 24, as the Navy proposed, they're planning to buy 13 ships and retire 12.
2018 overhauls are Pungdo, SYWTBAMN Aviation Part 1, Jackie Fisher, Battlecruisers Part 2, Did Iowa Move Sideways During a Broadside? and Auxiliaries Part 2. 2019 overhauls are Soviet Battleships Part 1, Alexander's review of the Newark Air Museum and Lord Nelson's Review of Soya, Battleship Aviation Part 4, The Scuttling of the High Seas Fleet and Spanish-American War Part 5. 2020 overhauls are Merchant Ships - Specialized Tankers and Cargo Ships, Naval Rations Part 1 and Tom Clancy. And 2021 overhauls are The Altmark Incident, The 3T Missiles - Introduction and Norway Parts one and two.
Comments
As fun as it would be to donate the A-10s to Ukraine so they can go to Plane Valhalla busting up Soviet artillery and tanks, it seems like it might take too long to train Ukrainian pilots on them.
At least some maintainers would need to be trained too, even for the very short time the A-10 fleet would survive in the skies over Ukraine. Also the planes would probably need their radios etc. changed out to be more compatible with the kit the Ukrainian armed forces are currently using (and to avoid giving them to the Russians when they shoot the A-10s down).
USS Samuel B Roberts (of Samar fame) has been discovered, and was described as "battered but largely intact". I almost find it harder to believe "intact" than "found", considering what she went up against.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61925862
Honest question about A-10s in Ukraine. Doesn't that war also "prove" that flying high is very dangerous in contested airspace? So, assuming friendly air defense also keeps enemy fighters' heads down, why is "low, slow and well armored" not a valid option?
"Low and slow" isn't a viable option because there are just so many things that can hit you down there, and also because by definition you start any engagement in a place where you don't have the energy to escape from threats. In particular, MANPADS are only getting more common and more capable as time goes by. "High and fast" gets you entirely out of the envelope for the small stuff - and the big stuff is too expensive to deploy in the same kind of numbers, leaving it vulnerable to suppression by jamming and/or destruction. Plus you have lots of energy for escape maneuvers if necessary, though of course that risks dragging you down into the engagement envelopes of the lesser threats you were trying to avoid. ("High and stealthy" works in a similar way to "high and fast," but with a different mechanism to reduce the defenders' engagement window and with a reduced energy benefit.)
Also, I should also have mentioned that there is no such thing is an "armored airplane." The types most famous as "flying tanks" have small boxes of armor surrounding the pilot, and in some cases the engine(s), but the airframes and control lines aren't armored - and can't be, because armor is very heavy. So simply taking hits and hoping you can shrug them off is a game that you can only play for a short while before your airplane becomes unflyable - and even if you're lucky and you manage to return to base without crashing/ejecting, your airplane is very likely to need time consuming, expensive repairs before it can be returned to duty (assuming it can be at all).
Most of Ukraine's Su-25s are still flying, four months into the war, so I wouldn't be so quick to assume A-10s would be immediately shot out of the sky.
The Su-25s do most of their work in peripheral theatres like Kherson and Kharkiv, rather than in the Donbas where the SAM/AAA density is highest. And they seem to be doing standoff attacks only, not strafing tanks or doing laydown cluster-bomb attacks or the like, but I think that's been SOP for the A-10 for the past few decades as well.
Low + Slow + Armored + Don't fly directly over the enemy, still seems viable, at least as long as the enemy doesn't have air superiority. Why the Russian Air Force hasn't established air superiority over all of Ukraine is still sort of a mystery, but so long as it is so then a combination of A-10s, standoff munitions, and trained crews would actually help the Ukrainians quite a bit.
The crew training issue is not trivial, though I think it could have been done in the four months we've already had. The prospect of American-built jets bombing Bryansk or Belgorod or Rostov if the Ukrainians get carried away, and Russia overreacting to that, also needs to be considered.
In today's news, I note that the USS Samuel B. Roberts, lost in the action off Samar with 89 of her crew, has been found in 6,895 meters of water - the deepest shipwreck yet discovered.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61925862
Sadly, the last survivor of the Roberts' crew passed away earlier this year.
Maybe the reason the Russian Air Force hasn’t established air superiority over all of Ukraine is because they're not even trying. Does Russian doctrine place as much importance as the US' (or any at all) on achieving air superiority before doing anything else? AIUI, they've accepted that they will always operate in contested airspace, at least against peer opponents. Hug the ground, dodge the AD and losses be damned.
@Philistine
Thanks for the answers!
I get the "low altitude is death, energy is life" viewpoint in general, but I'm not sure how well it applies relative to ground-based air defense on a tactical level. When a SAM just launched underneath, it probably has enough energy, and the "expensive stuff" will be that much more capable versus countermeasures. Also, long range means a lot more of them will be able to take a shot, further denying any advantage in maneuvering and energy (turn to defeat one kinetically, another's job just got that much easier).
By armored, I meant of course survivable in a general sense. The A-10 seems purpose built to keep flying after taking hits, which I realize is anathema for modern, peacetime thinking, but I strongly believe is unavoidable against competent adversaries.
Something that always bothered me about A-10 discussions was why the survivability arguments don't also apply to helicopter gunships. Are they better off because they can go really low and literally stationary?
Yes, an advantage of helicopter gunships is that they can go low enough to hide behind almost any terrain (trees, buildings, etc.). This is a such a key component of their doctrine that they're equipped with sensors on a mast above the rotor so they can peek out from behind terrain without exposing themselves.
RE: High & Fast
Both of those things make the CAS mission much harder to actually do. The idea is you launch on short notice from an airfield near the front, get to the trouble spot, and chew up enough stuff to make the brewing enemy counter attack ineffective. That last part requires you to be able to tell what is going on - hard to do at 4 miles up and mach 3.
AlexT:
No, they're trying (or at least were at the start of their 'special military operation'), they just aren't able to do it.
echo:
I suspect they do, with the disadvantage that an Apache or Hind can't fly as high as an A-10.
ike:
An A-10 could be even higher and still effective thanks to PGMs, so could an Su-25 if Russia had PGMs which they basically don't.
Out of interest/curiosity I posted the A-10 question on our pilots' forum to see what former A-10 pilots thought would be the time required for a Ukranian pilot to be mission ready.
An assumption going in is that the Ukranian pilot is already tactically qualified in something like the Su-25.
General consensus was 60 days for proficiency. This fits in with John's observation that they could have been ready well within the past four months.
There were questions, of course, if Ukraine could exercise reasonable air superiority over the area. A reasonable expectation as there are enough tasks already for an A-10 without adding in avoidance of a serious air to air threat. This, of course, is a big "if." You certainly don't want to be committing too many CAS assets without there being a modicum of cover for them.
No confirmation on this, but rumors are surfacing that the airspace in places is so fraught for the Ukranians that Mi-8s doing medevacs, when possible, don't want to venture above 10 meters--preferably lower when possible. Also rumored is that the Russians have taken down any number of the Bayraktars.
Perhaps more interesting were some of the replies from the F-16 guys as there has always been that chatter, serious or not, about Ukraine somehow/someway being provided this platform.
Again hypothetically, here the consensus was 90 days but with many caveats. Would the mission be air to air? Air to ground? How much time training for a strike package employment? Are you training for multi-role or single?
The F-16 question also begs the question of just how much proficiency and recency of experience the pilot is bringing into training. At least before February/March period Ukranian pilots were on the hind teet when it came to training hours. Practically no pilot was afforded the multi-role currency that Western air forces enjoy (yes, I understand there are holes here as well).
Re the A-10 and CAS, it's worth pointing out that we do CAS very differently than we did even 30 years ago. Thanks to JDAM and datalinks, we can do CAS from the B-52. No need to go messing around at low level. There's a bit more call in Battlefield Air Interdiction, but even there, targeting pods and datalinks offer us a lot more options than we used to.
We can do CAS from a B-52 over Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't think anyone will be doing CAS from anything like a B-52 over Ukraine any time soon. Our approach starts with being spoiled rotten by the assumption of complete air superiority and fully-suppressed air defenses; neither side in the current war can afford that.
I'm not saying we'd do it from B-52s in a war with Russia. But the basic technology that lets a B-52 do it at all also lets an A-10 do it without having to put his own eyes on the target.
I think the Russians would like to establish air superiority over Ukraine if they could, but they don't really have the equipment or the training they would need to take apart Ukraine's air defenses. (Not from the air, anyway - I've seen claims that Russian artillery has been more successful in that regard.) AIUI Soviet doctrine, inherited by Russia, called for mostly letting the air war come to them, fighting over friendly ground forces so that they rarely/never needed to blast their way through belts of hostile SAMs and AAA. As a result of that doctrine, they didn't spend the time, energy, and money that Western air forces did on developing SEAD/DEAD capability. (And while the US almost certainly could and would establish air superiority in such a situation, it would require a major effort to do so and would absorb most of the attention of US air assets for the first days of the conflict.)
@John Schilling:
Doesn't the "Low + Slow + Armored + Don’t fly directly over the enemy" plan make the "armored" part redundant? Yes the A-10 can (and does) operate by staying way back from the front lines and lobbing PGMs at targets designated by ground forces, but if that's the job then pretty much anything with wings can do it - and a B-52 or B-1B could do it a lot better, or a Super Tucano (or even a drone!) could do it a lot cheaper.
@AlexT:
Even after accounting for the longer ranges on paper of the big, expensive SAM systems, the threat environment is just a lot less dense at altitude; and luckily, "high and fast" also does a number on the effective engagement ranges of air defense systems. That makes it a lot more viable to jam and/or HARM the relative few that are in a position to threaten your strike package.
And like I said, the problem with going for "survivability" via absorbing hits vs. avoiding hits is that even if it works, you end up having to take a bunch of aircraft out of service for lengthy, expensive repairs. Badly damaged aircraft are out of the battle, probably the campaign, and possibly the inventory just as surely as if they'd been shot down.
@echo:
Yes, helicopters are absolutely as vulnerable to most of this stuff as fixed-wing aircraft. More, even: we have video from Ukraine of an insufficiently evasive Russian attack helicopter being shot down by an anti-tank missile! So they too try to avoid coming over the horizon from enemy forces - but as DampOctopus said, they make more use of ground cover and mast-mounted sights to do that.
@ike:
In WW2, that was the only way to do CAS. In Korea, that was the only way to do CAS. In Vietnam, that was the only way to do CAS. By Desert Storm, that was a way to do CAS - but not necessarily the most efficient or effective way. Now the preferred method of doing CAS is to have a platform (which could be pretty much anything) loitering high overhead all the time, tossing PGMs at targets that ground forces have singled out for special attention. In addition to being a lot safer for the CAS platform, this gives much faster reaction times with a lot less chance of blue-on-blue engagements than doing CAS the old way.
@John Schilling:
What environments are safe enough to operate A-10s but not safe enough for B-52s? Neither of them wants to get anywhere near even semi-modern air defenses at this point - if anything, the B-52 probably has the edge here due to sheer size allowing for a really good ECM fit.
@Philistine
I am glad that I continue my tradition of being a generation behind the times.
2 questions about B52-as-CAS:
-Are B52(designed for strike warfare) able to keep up with the operational tempo CAS requires? Maybe the USAF doesn't notice because its wars don't last more than about a week.
-Hitting a target painted by a friendly rifleman with a PGB sounds like 'Indirect fire artillery' with more steps and more expensive.
Philistine:
The Super Tucano is too small for a lot of what the US has been doing (consider that larger planes have been running out of ammo doing CAS…).
A non-armored version of the A-10 could have more endurance or more bombs or about the same of both and less powerful (but cheaper) engines. The Textron Scorpion looks like the closest thing to that (even that isn't quite there on payload).
ike:
They got almost two decades out of one of them.
ike:
In some ways, yes, but aircraft a lot more mobile than artillery.
@ike
Yes, because one B-52 can carry two dozen bombs, which is at a minimum equivalent to six other planes. There are two problems with this in a really hot war. First, the B-52s will probably be busy elsewhere. Second, nobody will be able to loiter like they can today, so there isn't much difference between an F-16, an A-10 and a B-52 in terms of practical bomb capacity.
First, generally the guy on the ground has a better view of what needs to be destroyed than the pilot possibly could have. The bit where the pilot has to figure out what needs to be destroyed is mostly a limit of what was possible in the old days. Second, you misunderstand the US military. It doesn't win wars by fighting efficiently. It wins by doing a lot of extremely expensive things, which the other side can't afford to match.
@Anonymous
This is why I keep pushing the BKC-46.
Things I can't unsee: An early sketch for what eventually became Richlieu had two quadruple turrets forward of the engines and aft of the tower, meaning no turrets able to fire either forward or aft. I can only look at it and ask why anyone would sketch such an abomination.
@bean: I don't think ike's comparison between air support and artillery is a criticism of the reliance on a friendly rifleman to paint the target. It's a criticism - or, at least, a question - of the use of an aircraft to deliver a PGM to that target, when a similar PGM can be delivered more cheaply by ground-based artillery.
Anonymous makes one good counterpoint: that aircraft are more mobile than artillery. I'd add to this that aircraft aren't vulnerable to counter-battery fire (though they are, instead, vulnerable to SAMs and AAMs).
Still, if the changing nature of CAS means that the aircraft is just an expensive bomb truck, I expect this would lead to a shift from CAS to ground-based artillery, particularly in long-ranged roles (the short-ranged roles already being dominated by artillery). Is there evidence of this happening?
@DampOctopus
There's a couple things going on here. Part of it is that aircraft and artillery aren't the same thing. A typical 155mm artillery shell is about 100 lbs. A typical aircraft bomb starts at 500, and has a much higher fraction of explosives because it doesn't have to fly out of a gun. Given the low cost of JDAM and the mess that most guided artillery shell programs are, on a cost per target, the aircraft attack is almost certainly cheaper.
But a lot of it is also that this is America, and we never take the cheap way when there's a more expensive and flashier way that also works. Or, more practically, the purveyors of air power have a lot more political clout than the artillerists do, so in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, they're going to fight for and get more of the support missions than they would via an objective analysis.
On the gripping hand, the point about mobility is well-made. A typical 155 round can reach out to maybe 22 km/14 mi, which allows the gun to cover less than 1% of the area a typical plane can cover. (How much less depends on a bunch of assumptions about fuel states and loiter time.) It has advantages of its own (can work in all weather, never leaves station), but particularly in a counterinsurgency where you're going to have to deal with targets popping up unexpectedly over a broad area, the cost advantage of artillery starts to erode pretty rapidly.
@bean
Surely you mean the BC-25B!
I also think there is an interesting concept for an FC-25B (or an FB-1B) that essentially serves as a high capacity high endurance airborne AMRAAM arsenal over the South China Sea or whatever, especially if paired with an E-3/E-2/Aegis.
@redRover
The 747 line is shutting down. The 767 line isn't. More seriously, I'd want to look at a BC-37 as the alternative, given the possible payload tradeoffs involved.
As for the FB-1B, they were looking at fitting the B-52 with AMRAAM in the late Cold War, and the Navy wanted to do something similar with the A-6.
@Phillisine: The Ukrainian front lines are demonstrably safe enough for Su-25s doing standoff attacks, so almost certainly safe enough for A-10s. Just make sure to apply a clue-by-four to anyone daft enough to suggest using the awesomely awesome 30mm Gatling gun with all its awesomeness.
The Russian Air Force considers Ukrainian airspace to be Not Safe for Tu-22M bombers at altitude, which are comparable to B-52s in vulnerability. They did some bombing runs over Mariupol, back when that was a besieged city ~100 km inside Russian lines, but otherwise it's just standoff attacks. And not "JDAM from 30 km" standoff, but heavy cruise missiles from 300 km.
Anything high enough and close enough to drop a JDAM on a target at the Ukrainian front, is S-300 bait. The United States Air Force has gotten itself completely spoiled rotten by not having to fight against anyone with a modern-ish integrated air defense system in the past half-century or so.
And they can pretend they're still so awesome that puny surface-to-air missiles are no threat to their planes. It's even possible that this is true. But it's also quite possible that it isn't. I'd hope they are looking closely at lessons learned from the first real high-intensity war of this generation, and hedging their bets accordingly.
@John Schilling:
We've seen the Russians using big 300km-range anti-ship cruise missiles to bombard Ukrainian buildings, which is a sufficiently inefficient use of said weapons that it becomes reasonable to speculate that they don't have any 30km JDAM-skis available. And if you're going to be shooting missiles with a 300km range at the target anyway - because the cupboard is bare of anything in between your premiere anti-carrier missiles and iron bombs - you might as well stand way, way, off, to make sure there's not even an opportunity for some Ukrainian to get lucky.
And as previously noted, Western air forces - and the US in particular - have put a lot more effort into training and equipping themselves to suppress and/or destroy Soviet-style air defense networks over the past 50+ years than the Russians (or the Soviets before them) ever did. I am not saying "puny SAMs are no threat to US planes," I'm saying that by 4 months into a high-intensity conflict like this I would be very surprised if the US hadn't made a major effort to break down the enemy's IADS - and almost as surprised if that effort hadn't been at least mostly successful.
redRover:
BC-25C you mean, the B suffix goes to the new VC-25B.
bean:
Are you sure a Lockheed Electra has the payload capacity for that (assuming old airframes are even obtainable)?
Or base it on a P8 which already has a bomb bay and it might even be usable as a Joint STARS replacement that can blow things up.
bean:
Cancel the F6D, someone proposes turning the A-6 into one.
@bean: I agree that a 155mm shell isn't a suitable substitute for an aircraft-delivered bomb, but rocket artillery comes closer, both in payload and in range. In some cases, it can even be the same munition: the SDB has a ground-launched variant. It doesn't quite match the range of an aircraft, so the gripping-hand point about mobility/coverage still applies, but it's eroded a bit.
I take your point about the importance of inter-service rivalry, though. And the difference in range requirements between counterinsurgency and traditional warfare is something I hadn't considered.
There's a legal squabble over the San Jose, a sunken Spanish treasure galleon that has been found in Colombian waters.(link)
Maybe it would be more accurate to compare the air-dropped bomb to an MRSI salvo from a full battery. AIUI, a valid comparison would require comparable cost of the firing platforms, plus logistics footprint and manpower/training requirements.
Not to mention the arty isn't visible until after it fires.
Sure, the plane can hope to cover more ground by loitering. Which nobody is doing in the current iteration of high-intensity warfare, for some reason.
@AlexT
I know the cost/capability discussion has been ground to a fine dust, but you do wonder for this sort of thing if it ends up bringing low cost / moderate capability persistent presence platforms back into vogue. Like an MQ-1 built at lower cost in larger numbers would give you loitering missiles and targeting data for more dedicated SEAD missions. (But only if the leadership conceptualizes them as disposable, basically low speed / high endurance missiles, rather than trying to turn them into mini Global Hawks)
The C-37 is a Gulfstream V, but that was a mistake on my part. Should have been BC-40.
The P-8's bomb bay is pretty small, so you'd need to redo it, probably with a big rotary launcher. But yes, in practice it would be a BP-8.
You joke, but the Navy was seriously worried that McNamara would fold the A-6 into the F-111 program as well.
Do the arguments against the A-10 basically also apply to the AH-64 and other attack helicopters? If the A-10 is no longer a viable platform for near-peer conflicts due to increasingly sophisticated MANPADS, should we consider attack helicopters to be nonviable as well?
Others have mentioned flying extremely low, hiding behind terrain, etc. - is this really enough to provide survivability against near-peer threats? I would think that there wouldn't always be suitable terrain, and MANPADS could also incorporate "top attack" modes similar to what's used by various anti-tank missile systems.
Top attack missiles still need to see their target. They just hit from above where the armour is thinner. I don't think they'd help much against a helicopter behind cover, and you would have to know there was one to shoot at in the first place. Does anyone know how they perform against turret down tanks? That's probably the closest analogy for seeing a sensor mast poking up from behind tree cover.
I wonder if putting the missiles on a simpler AH-60, and having the sensors on a drone would work better? I think they used to train Apaches and Kiowas to work in hunter-killer teams.
Alexander is right about the reasons you can't do top attack on helicopters. More broadly, you generally need a much better sensor to locate and identify the target than you need to home in on it. And the problem is that telling a weapon "go over there and kill something" means you either need to rigorously constrain what sort of targets you're looking for (mines, for instance) or make the weapon extremely smart. Modern electronics and AI have made this vaguely feasible in some cases, but those tend to involve either quite clear targets (CEC-enabled SAMs and AAMs) or the missile moving quite slowly and getting to pick its target with care. Neither one really applies here, and I don't think that sort of performance can be built into a MANPADS.
Leaving aside whether top-attack MANPADS are feasible, is the ability to hide behind hills and treelines enough to make attack helicopters useful in situations where A-10s aren't?
Maybe. Not being seen by enemy forces is if anything even more important for helicopters than for airplanes; the world saw that 30+ years ago in Afghanistan, and the threats are more lethal and more widespread now than they were then.
Yes, the helicopter can fly lower than any fixed-wing aircraft, and yes, that allows it to hide behind cover that no fixed-wing aircraft could utilize. And yes, the development of mast-mounted sights (or perhaps better yet, networks of offboard sights) give it the ability to shoot from cover. Whether or not that's "useful" - or more accurately, whether or not it's useful enough to be worth doing even in a high-intensity war, as opposed to the counter-insurgency operations the US has been doing for the past couple of decades - is more difficult to answer.
AlexT:
They can also take off from a nearby base and be there in minutes, if artillery hasn't been prepositioned response time will be much greater.
Though B-52 CAS does involve loitering.
bean:
Which doesn't actually sound all that unreasonable, assuming of course that the F-111B were something other than a bad idea.
Philistine:
The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and Putin's 'special military operation' in Ukraine might be the only cases in which low flying aircraft were regularly threatened by serious weapons and in both cases it doesn't look like helicopters, even heavily armored ones like the Hind are very survivable against MANPADS.
If helicopters can survive while still doing actual fighting it does not appear that anyone has figured out how to do it.
I am baffled by a section I just found in the new Dulin & Garzke book on Bismarck, where they credit the loss of Queen Mary at Jutland to insufficient armor protection. I know that was widely accepted in the 1930s, but we know today it wasn't really true, and you should not act like it is. I know that both of them know better.