WASHINGTON – Although the U.S. Air Force has been fighting for years to sunset the A-10 attack plane so it can move resources to newer fighters, Secretary Deborah Lee James tells Aviation Week the air arm may once again delay plans to retire the Thunderbolt II.
The Air Force’s latest plan is to begin gradually sunsetting the A-10 in fiscal year 2018, with the last aircraft heading to the boneyard in fiscal 2021. But Congress is once again pushing back, arguing that divesting the so-called Warthog leaves the Air Force without a dedicated close-air support (CAS) platform, leaving soldiers on the ground vulnerable to enemy fire.
“The plan has us gradually retiring the A-10 beginning in the final couple of years of the five-year plan, but Congress appears to be saying no to that,” James said. “We would also consider: could we keep the A-10s, by different approaches, longer in our inventory than we project?”
This would not be the first time the Air Force has caved to pressure from Congress and the public to keep the A-10 around longer than planned. For the past several years, the Air Force has attempted to retire the A-10 in order to move precious maintainers and resources to standing up the fifth-generation F-35. But each year the Air Force has shifted its budget plans, most recently citing the Warthog’s critical role in the campaign against Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
“I want to be absolutely crystal clear that we stand by 150 percent the close-air support mission and there’s a variety of aircraft that contribute to that,” James stressed. “Bottom line is we have got the backs of the ground troops and we are going to continue to be experts on CAS.”
http://aviationweek.com/defense/us-air- ... f544c43629
Those who claim the F-35 is ready to take over the CAS role are clearly high on paraffin. It is possible that this aircraft may never be ready for this role...
Another of the F-35’s basic shortcomings is the lack of a usable cannon. The Block 3i aircraft lacks the ability to employ the cannon because the software needed for it is a Block 3F development and has yet to be completed. This issue has been reported many times before.
Now we learn that there are doubts that the most recent version of the plane’s complicated helmet, which is the only way to aim the cannon, will be accurate enough to reliably hit air-to-air or ground targets.
This latest DOT&E report also makes public another problem with the cannon on the Air Force’s variant of the plane, the F-35A. This is the only variant that includes an internal cannon. The variants for the Marine Corps and Navy both use an external belly-mounted gun pod.
In order to keep the F-35A stealthy, the internal cannon sits behind a small door that opens when the cannon is fired. The Air Force proudly released a video of the first time an F-35A test fired its cannon in flight. Now we know that the simple action of opening the small door causes the plane to turn slightly because of the door’s drag, possibly enough to cause the cannon to miss.
The DOT&E memo reports that these door-induced aiming errors “exceed accuracy specifications” which will make it quite difficult for pilots to hit targets. And since the Air Force’s F-35 only holds 181 rounds — as opposed to 511 for the F-16 and 1,100 for the A-10 — every bullet will count....
F-35 close air support threatens troops on the ground
As the debate continues about the future of the close air support mission, one thing is certain: the F-35 simply is not ready to support ground troops, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt it ever will be.
This latest DOT&E memorandum undermines one of the fundamental arguments in favor of the F-35 in the CAS role — that the F-35 will need to provide close air support in places with high levels of enemy air defenses, a mission that would require stealth capabilities.
But the battles in which CAS is needed don’t generally take place in areas where there are high levels of enemy air defenses. The memo points out that close air support is normally conducted in low-air defense threat environments.
This is a simple acknowledgement of the “close” in close air support.
When close air support is discussed, it is important to consider the entire military system, both air and ground forces.
These forces support each other mutually. By the time the ground troops who engage the enemy in close combat get involved, our military has already cleared out the heavy air defense. And the enemy ground troops will not be dragging around bulky, lightly armored, slow-to-move, hard-to-resupply “high threat” missile systems into the battle area because they will be too busy maneuvering and dodging bullets in the ground fight.
Beyond that, the F-35’s ability to perform any CAS right now is extremely limited.
As the DOT&E memorandum says clearly, “The F-35A in the Block 3i configuration has numerous limitations which make it less effective overall at CAS than most currently-fielded fighter aircraft like the F-15E, F-16, F-18 and A-10.”
As mentioned earlier, the F-35A, now declared “Initially Operationally Capable,” can only carry two bombs, both of which are too big to be safely used near friendly troops. And even if these bombs could be used in CAS, the plane has to immediately fly back to its base to reload after only one pass over an enemy formation.
For F-35As, that base is likely to be far from the battlefield since the plane needs an 8,000 foot concrete runway with a massive logistical footprint, thus seriously slowing CAS response times.
Air support for friendly troops fighting the enemy is exactly where the lack of a usable cannon is most distinctly felt — and the F-35 won’t have a usable and test-proven cannon until 2019, at best.
Cannons are the most effective weapon in far more CAS situations than rockets (which the F-35A currently does not carry) or a couple of guided bombs (which it does). This is true especially when the plane needs to engage a target in a “danger close” situation, with the enemy in very close proximity to friendly troops.
A GBU-12, the smaller of the two bombs the F-35A can currently employ, is a 500-pound bomb. At 250 meters (820 feet), a 500-pound bomb has a 10 percent chance of incapacitating a friendly soldier based on the military’s risk-estimate table. That might not seem like much, but history has proven that most firefights actually take place at considerably less than 100 meters.
If F-35As are the aircraft providing CAS, this means that enemies closing with our troops will have plenty of room — 150 meters or more — to maneuver free of fire from above.
An effective cannon on the plane closes that gap. The F-35 is supposed to eventually use a 25-millimeter cannon. The risk-estimate factor for that weapon is 100 meters. Of course the safe distance depends on how accurate the aircraft platform and aiming system is.
As noted in the DOT&E memo, the simple act of opening the cannon door on the Air Force’s variant pulls the plane to one side — which could shift the bullet impacts either closer toward friendly troops or away from the enemy’s (thereby rendering the attack dangerous or useless).
But that presupposes the F-35 will actually be able to stay over the battlefield long enough to be on hand to drop its bombs or fire its cannon exactly when needed. The F-35 is a notorious gas-guzzler that relies heavily on aerial tankers to stay on station for any length of time to be useful for the ground troops.
According to the memorandum, “the F-35 has high fuel burn rates and slow air refueling rates that extend air refueling times and decreases overall on-station time.”
Unfortunately, the troops on the ground can’t call a time-out when their air support has to leave the battle to refuel or reload. The high fuel burn rate and high drag of the F-35 creates a plane that has “short legs” and inadequate on-station times.
All variants and versions of the F-35 share this problem. Current short-legged fighters mitigate this deficiency by rotating flights of planes back to the tanker while another remains over the battlefield. But with the well-documented problems the services’ maintainers have keeping the F-35 flightworthy, it is doubtful there will be enough flyable planes to make such a rotation practical any time soon.
Actual current F-35 sortie rates reveal the severity of the problem — today’s F-35s are flying one sortie every five days.
In other words, a squadron deployment of 12 F-35s to Afghanistan or Syria — such as is typical for F-16s or A-10s — would only be able to put up slightly more than one two-ship mission a day to cover the whole country
https://warisboring.com/the-f-35-stealt ... .6u3ijkud9
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... -Memo.html
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