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Originally Posted by AirGunner
Actually, no I am not kidding about politics in the UAV community. It's not like the other examples that you cited though. Regardless of personal opinions regarding RPA's and the role they play, it is quite apparent that the "Drone lobby" does have some serious pull in Congress as do other defense projects.....
While those articles clearly articulate the associations with the RPA industry and Congress, we have yet to see those associations have much of an effect on military operations and military decisions to date. The reality is that USAF and USN leadership have actually stiff-armed RPA involvement by and large. The AF pushed RPA away from A3 to A2 and one of the famous falling outs between SECDEF Gates and USAF leadership involved Gates' belief that USAF leadership was slow-rolling RPA deployment. USN leadership was more successful, operating just a few MQ-9s, some small UAVs, and only now are they getting into BAMS.
What all of those articles fail to make clear is what the goals of the industry members of that organization are, I think military ops are not close to the top of the list. First off, I will say that membership in an organization like this is not necessarily all bad. As the target audience of much of the technology and the controller of the purse strings, it makes some sense that civilian leadership be informed of the capabilities. The same goes to ops in the national airspace system, as they control the FAA indirectly (through the budget and confirmation process), they should probably be aware of the state of that process. I actually think that if you were to ask industry what the most important thing congress could do for them was, they would point to NAS operations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AirGunner
I don't think that anyone with recent experience in theater will deny the capability that RPA's bring to the fight. Unfortunately, we have to "rob Peter to pay Paul" in regards to fiscal issues. The cancellation of this particular project will allow the Air Force to free up funding for other important projects as well.
Dude, the fallacy that many have been operating under is that it hasn't ALWAYS been a rob Peter to pay Paul world. Just because the DoD budgets were allowed to spiral with no controls in place over the last few years doesn't mean that reality wouldn't set in at some point (or that reality shouldn't have been imposed earlier). Let me use an analogy: if you owned a taxi/limo service, would you equip your fleet solely with 30 pax buses when only 2% of your business required 30 pax buses and the average trip was only 3 pax? We have to equip our military to fight across the entire spectrum, but we focus SOLELY on the high end of the spectrum and end up with a lesser equipped military in the end.
Our entire airlift fleet doesn't have to be C-17s when only a small percentage of our airlift requirement requires outsized cargo capability or austere field delivery - maybe if we reduced our C-17 buy by 25% and spent that money on lesser capable airlift aircraft we'd have 25%-35% more total airlift aircraft in the fleet. Look at how many hours we're putting on C-17s with aeromedical missions, channels, etc (all missions that don't require C-17 capabilities), aging the fleet prematurely, when we could more evenly distribute those hours across a larger fleet had we spent the money better.
The same goes for the F-22. 187 F-22s total for a global air superiority mission???? Only 25% or less of the possible scenarios require pure F-22 capes and we only really need enough F-22s to accomplish that mission. We'd be better off with 50 F-22s and 250 upgraded F-15s (assuming a 2:1 cost of F-15 upgrade to F-22 purchase - an over-estimation of the upgrade cost).
The same even applies to your helicopters. The only combat helos we have now are the UH-60s and the V-22, and we don't have very many of them. We lost MH-53s a long time ago due to the Peter and Paul concept. How many times has ACC given away and taken back the rescue role? All of that was over nothing more than ACC not wanting to divert dollars from fighters/bombers to helos.
Don't forget that we've also gotten rid of a portion of the B-1 fleet (and 2 Guard B-1 squadrons - the two with the highest MR rate at the time), F-117s, F-15s, ANG F-16s, etc. In addition to the the fact that our equipment has gotten better, it's gotten more expensive so now we have less of it. Many will readily admit that their are plenty of scenarios that we are less capable of handling today than we were 10 years ago.
We need a full-spectrum military. In particular, our USAF needs to be able to support the Army across their entire spectrum of operations. That means airlift of people and material, that means CAS as well as battlefield preparation and interdiction, that means counter-air, and that means full-spectrum ISR before/during/and after any dynamic events - from the most limited engagement all the way to full-scale conventional on conventional battle. And, to tie this to the thread, nowhere in there is a mandate to keep a man in the cockpit. It's all about the mission, and it's the job of military leadership to do what it takes to accomplish the mission (killing the enemy and keeping US forces safe), not pad someone's logbook. If it takes RPA to give everyone who needs it ISR, so be it. If it takes RPA to give everyone who needs it CAS, so be it. As I've said in another post, it isn't MQ-1 vs F-16 for the guy on the ground, it's MQ-1 or nothing because we don't have that many F-16s anymore. We didn't get rid of F-16s because we bought RPA; even the ANG F-16 squadrons that converted from F-16s to RPA - they were losing their airplanes regardless. Thankfully, we had RPA to replace the aircraft we lost.