F15Cricket

You make a great point as to what the USAF should buy. I think stealth would have been game-changing if the F-22 / F-35 combo would have been fielded in significant numbers on time, I.e., the late 90s!

As to your first comment that the Hawg is the most effective aircraft for wars we will fight, all I can say is history has generally shown that those who expect the next war to be like the last are normally wrong. In addition, CAS is a mission, not an aircraft, so I think there are other platforms that can do the job well.

3006hunter

You are 100% correct on the next war scenario. But keep in mind the USAF is planning to fight in the Pacific yet we find our self back in Iraq. And from the Intel I have gotten, this isn't going away anytime soon.

Unfortunately many pointy nose guys think CAS is just about dropping a GBU38/12 on a grid passed by a JTAC. That is like me saying ACM is just shooting AIM-120s at radar blips. If the A-10 wasn't needed, you wouldn't see the outcry of support that has tried to keep it in service.

satpak77

just curious but when was last time a US fighter aircraft engaged another enemy fighter aircraft in an air-to-air scenario ?

F15Cricket

Not necessarily true, as I am sure a lot of it has to do with congressmen keeping the aircraft and associated jobs in their district.

Well, me and my squadron over Serbia in March 1999, but let me ask you this: what did the Iraqis do with their fighters in 2003? They buried them because they knew we would annihilate them if they took off. So, in many respects, the reason the A-10 (and B-1, B-52, Predator, etc) have been able to conduct their CAS mission so effectively is because of the air superiority we have gained.

"I wouldn't be here if we didn't have air superiority." Gen Dwight Eisenhower on the Normandy beaches

And, by the way, I am guessing you are discounting all the NORAD intercepts (9/11), and all the renewed Cold War intercepts of Russian Bear bombers along our coasts over the last few years, as well as all the intercepts in the Baltic.

You are making a false dilemma argument--it is NOT either/or air superiority / CAS. The argument is what is the BEST mix of aircraft to fight the future wars we expect to face, and based on limited budgets, it probably is not best to keep a single-mission aircraft in service that is only survivable in low threat areas.

BDGERJMN

A bit of devil's advocate here but game changing in what sense? Are we saying that China/Russia wouldn't be developing 5th and 6th Gen FTRs if we had bought and built F-22/F-35 sooner? Or game changing in the sense of how we plan to fight? Either way the plans are a function to some extent of the forces available to achieve the objectives of the plan...perhaps we could have planned a bit earlier/often but the end result is the same absent one or a few of those plans going into action. My point is the 10 yr or so delay in buying F-35 really matters not, long term other than the cost associated with it. The gaps created by the delay, specifically the Strike/Fighter shortfall within the USN/USMC and I'm sure the USAF as well, are really a function of increased(unplanned) usage over the past 13 yrs. Sure we were going to be short aircraft here and there, but not in the same numbers we're seeing now. Couple that with the budget arguments above and well, there you have it. I'm just not sold that buying it earlier and often would have done much to change the game...though it would have given us a lot of shiny pennies on the flight line.

F15Cricket

Basically, I meant we would have had operational 5th gen fighters a decade+ before Russia or China. That would have been game changing. Instead, China and Russia both announce / reveal their 5th gen fighters within a week or so of the SecDef announcing the F-22's cancellation ... Their reason for the cancellation? "no peer competitors", yet China is now mass producing their TWO 5th Gen fighters, I believe.

RhinoPherret

From what I have gathered watching this program; when the F-22 purchases ended, additional mission and functional requirements were placed upon the 35. The pundits have noted that this in turn led to further increases in the overall cost of each 35 which of course lead to the inevitable increase in the cost of each 35 over each 22. Add in another part (reasoning) and I am paraphrasing; the 35 was supposed to leverage off of the supply chain management, technology development, and other “economies of scale” of the 22. This did not happen of course and the 35 program ended up bearing lot of the additional costs along with the typical (sing the chorus with me, you know the words) “Typical mismanagement common with large defense projects”.

Reducing the number of 35’s produced also inevitably increased the per plane costs due to the non-recurring engineering, manufacturing, and testing costs.

This all circles back to the original primary culprit that initiated this entire vicious doomed cycle: “concurrent design/build” philosophy.

satpak77

Great points but my question was my question. Engaged as in pulling the trigger at another airborne aircraft who was airborne against the shooter-US aircraft.

Thank you for your service by the way.

Tanker-driver

The A-10s are all paid for and are extremely cheap to operate (relatively speaking compared to a 5th gen fighter). Why can't we have both? Cut a squadron or two of F-35s and you might have money to operate the A-10 fleet for some time. Cut another squadron of Lightning IIs, and maybe I could get paid for that TDY I went on two months ago!

USMCFLYR

I would say this was probably the last time:
It doesn't take pulling the trigger though to recognize the value of control. Knowing that their aircraft would be shot down and therefore not sending them up in the first place is a win.