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Air Force tests two turboprops as potential A-10 “replacements” (arstechnica.com)
35 points by rbanffy on June 19, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 66 comments



Part of the problem is the missions the Pentagon imagines itself in, versus the missions they wind up in. Dreaming of fighting a high-tech peer is one thing, but we've spent 15 years needing close air support for ground troops under fire from irregular infantry who are themselves in light vehicles or under minimal fortification (ie behind rocks or in regular buildings). And when your weapon for that is a single high-end bomb from a plane that costs tens of millions of dollars and is flying too fast to actually see the battlefield... well, that's a recipe for ineffective air support, collateral damage, and friendly fire deaths, not to mention some outrageous costs and a lot of air time on planes that cost a lot to maintain.

But another problem with American policy is a need to keep American casualties to a minimum, to the point of being the overriding directive.

So from a combat perspective, a good solution is light, low-cost planes that can fly from very rough airstrips close by, armed with a light cannon that can shred buildings, light armor, and other low-intensity cover, and fly slow enough to make in-the-moment decisions from visual inspection by a human pilot. But such a plane is a tempting target for inexpensive, widely available shoulder-fired missiles, or even old-fashioned flak. And then casualties go up. This isn't WWII anymore. America won't tolerate high casualty rates politically for problems that are not existential threats to our nation.

And a cheap low-tech plane solution also has to slot in somewhere between drones (expensive but effective), and the helicopter gunships that have had the mission since Vietnam.

So instead, we're going to keep using hammers to swat flies, because we might need hammers against Russia someday and we're rich anyhow.


> Part of the problem is the missions the Pentagon imagines itself in, versus the missions they wind up in. > So instead, we're going to keep using hammers to swat flies, because we might need hammers against Russia someday and we're rich anyhow.

It's the basic game theory: you have to be prepared in wars you don't want to happen, exactly because you being prepared for them prevents it.

Preventing conflict by developing ways of measuring outcome of a potential conflict without actually acting it out is a technique that's been used by animals way before humans came along.


Mutual Assured Destruction has been more effective than high-tech planes at preventing wars between major powers.


MAD prevented a full-on nuclear war. Fighter planes and other high-tech equipment have helpved preventing proxy wars in a lot of hot regions around the globe.


We've been in proxy wars pretty much nonstop since MAD became a thing.


This is true, but in no way contradicts or disproves my point.


Well, it makes it seem that "preventing" means something different to you than it does to me.

Perhaps you could clarify your point a bit?


There are a lot more of proxy countries that don't go to active war and act out conflicts in a diplomatic manner – but you almost always don't notice these situations. Appealing to proxy wars that do happen is a survivorship bias.


Why are drones too expensive? When you consider pilot cost and risk it seems like you should be able to get a ton of savings.

Seems like you could build a drone that meets your other specifications. You can either spend the saved lbs on more armor and weapons, or make the aircraft lighter for even shorter takeoff.

My cynical view is that too many people wearing stars grew up in the cockpit, and are still fixated on human pilots. If a remote drone manager in Henderson can handoff a CAS asset to your control, why do you need a human pilot in the mix?


People will chime in about how the AF only likes shiny new fast jets, but the issue is not infatuation. The AF has to plan to perform against near peer opponents with good air defense systems, fighters, etc. So they'll usually be force by this into choosing something that is overkill for blowing up huts in Afghanistan. A small turboprop sounds great for low cost flight hours etc, but put it up against any modern AD and it's toast. You can try to mitigate this problem by having a high/low mix, (F15/F16), but that doesn't save you much money, and the AF has seen that the high usually ends up getting whacked for the low, and then ending up with lower performance. The Navy had the same problem with the F-14/F-18 mix. The F-18 was "good enough" for low intensity combat, but is inadequate for many other deployments.


> "The F-18 was "good enough" for low intensity combat, but is inadequate for many other deployments."

In other words it's been adequate in reality but inadequate in fantasy scenarios.


It absolutely kills me to argue against the F-14 especially after reading that every single one of them were turned into scrap to keep parts out of Iran. However... Tomcats had a long full life, were maintenance hogs, and had outlived their mission. Ouch, it hurt to write that, but it's probably true. The Rhino's (Super Hornets) are very capable.


The f14s mission went away. If you are worried about a sophisticated opponant attacking your carrier, a heavy fighter-interceptor is no longer a defense against modern missiles. It was a great plane for a job that no longer exists.

If you are really into weapon history, the Phoenix missile was originally meant for an airforce super interceptor, think an armed version of the SR-71. It was meant to shoot down Valkyrie-class supersonic bombers carrying nuclear weapons. That scenario never developed, but the navy took the missile for blue water battles defending carriers. Arguably, the f-14 was only so big and powerful because it needed to haul a radar capable of servicing the missile. Phoenix was never useful in mixed environments where friendlies might be in range because that wasn't part of the original intention. It was meant for killing big/fast things approaching in open sky, not picking out Migs over Syria.


It didn't help that it's flagship weapons system was made obsolete by politics.


It was interesting to read on the F-14 Wikipedia page that Iraqi pilots would often completely avoid engaging with Iranian Tomcats. Just the threat of the AIM-54 was enough to maintain air superiority.

"They performed well, but their primary role was to intimidate the Iraqi Air Force and avoid heavy engagement to protect the fleet's numbers. Their presence was often enough to drive away opposing Iraqi fighters. The precision and effectiveness of the Tomcat's AWG-9 weapons system and AIM-54A Phoenix long-range air-to-air missiles enabled the F-14 to maintain air superiority"


F-14D solved a lot of the issues via better engines. There were never enough TF-30s around to keep from having to scavenge from airframes. Can't really agree that they outlived their mission; they served well as Bombcats, clearly good enough for a multirole mission. Rhinos are probably better at ACM, but their (current) lack of range really hamstrings them.


Side note; not all were crushed. There are some on static display, I've seen one at a museum in Mcminnville, Oregon.

https://www.evergreenmuseum.org/


> near peer opponents with good air defense systems, fighters,

... and nuclear missiles. Which have rendered symmetrical overt warfare with peer opponents obsolete. From now on it's all either covert, assymetrical or deniable (fighting without insignia) warfare.

Rather than an opponent spend hundreds of billions of dollars on aircraft, it's much cheaper to spend it on Facebook attack ads to get America to destroy itself.


So far.

The US has never really faced a peer that was both economically and militarily its equal. The USSR never was. China might end up that way.

Israel has had nuclear weapons since the mid 1960's, yet still fought two existential wars. Nuclear weapons aren't a panacea; if your opponent thinks you won't use them, then they're worse than useless.


That F-18 Growler though... Worth it's weight in gold imo.


At this point, I wish that the fixed wing close air support mission would revert back to the Army. The F-35 is never going to be able to fill that role, and the Air Force seems really reluctant to devote any resources to the mission. The ability of the A-10 to linger in the area is not matched by any potential replacement.


Agreed. Attack helicopters plus some fixed-wing assets with long loiter give plenty of flexibility for various kinds of CAS missions. And all this should really belong to the Army (and Marines [1]) instead of the Air Force, which desperately wants to stay high, fast and stealthy.

[1] And the entire DoD needs to re-think about how and why we're usually deploying Marines on land, for typical land-based missions that are the main remit of the Army.


Currently there is an agreement between the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army [1] that the air force will control most fixed-wing aircraft and the army most helicopters. I think this is completely dumb and should be dispensed with right away. The air force could then relinquish the A-10s and any future ground support aircraft like (hypothetically) the Super Tucano to the Army if the Army cares to pay for it.

This would help ameliorate the current situation where the Air Force seems compelled to try to cancel every airplane that's not the F-35.

[1] Apparently this originates in the "Johnson-McConnell agreement of 1966" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson-McConnell_agreement_of...


I recall being on a weekend drill, camping and during the day we had A-10's flying low overhead, fast. I could see them looking up past the pine tree cover above us. Someone then told me it was just one A-10!


They've trained above our farm for decades. I would be surprised if there were "just one". They typically have a two-plane echelon, with the trailing "wing" separated by a fair distance. I suspect this formation allows the wing to respond when the leader draws ground fire.


I think the crucial problem is that the cost is borne by the Air Force but the benefit goes to other branches. This is a classic externality in reverse.


I will support the most extravagant and unnecessary new aircraft program the MI complex wants to push forward, PROVIDED that the resulting machines stay exclusively on US soil and in US airspace. Versus immediately being sent thousands of miles away to defend Israel, Europe, Japan and/or South Korea.


Somehow it very much resembles German's Stuka WWII fighter plane, both in appearance and role.


The very old Russian Su-25 looks very similar too and still seems to be doing well in the Syrian skies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-25


Why doesn’t the Army consider a “regional-turboprop” gunship? Something 1/3 the cost, and requiring 1/3 - 1/2 the crew, of an AC-130?

The don’t need the howitzers, just a couple of M61’s and a couple of the rocket pods.


Maybe we could use John Boyd spinning in his grave as a kind of power source to reduce costs?


Nothing can replace the A-10. Just make more of them. The more the better. A-10 saves the day baby. <3<3


The GAU-8, everybody's favorite reason to love the A-10; the autocannon the A-10 was built around, is obsolete. 30x173mm can no longer kill what it was meant for killing, and what it's actually killing in practice today can be killed just as well by 25x137mm.

If you built a new plane around a GAU-12 you'd get pound for pound more killing. Lighter smaller ammo means more of it, and trust me 25mm will kill anything you might plausibly be killing with 30mm in this century.

Don't worry though, I'm pretty sure the USAF is too arrogant to actually adopt a turboprop airplane, so the A-10 will likely be with us for the foreseeable future...


> I'm pretty sure the USAF is too arrogant to actually adopt a turboprop airplane

They can at least try to make it look more modern. Adopt pusher engines and a canard wing.


Incidentally, Burt Rutan (the founder of Scaled Composites, who are making Virgin Galactic's space ships) almost made a prototype of exactly this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_ARES

> The original layout was of a low wing canard configuration, aircraft powered by a pusher turboprop, and built around a 30 mm Gatling gun capable of destroying light armored vehicles

The actual prototype ended up with a turbofan. Still had a canard wing though. It also had a GAU-12 as the canon, just like GP wants.

It's also made out of fancy composites. It sounds like the perfect plane for the Hacker News Air Force.


For the record, I was being sarcastic.

And fancy shapes and materials resulted in the F-35 clusterfuck.


The AF is still running AC-130s, aren't they? Granted, that fills a role where air-superiority is a given, and it is reasonably safe to fly a bus loaded with auto-cannons in lazy circles, blasting the daylights out of anything that moves.


Those older planes can loiter like a teenager at a mall on Saturdays too.


They are, but ever since [1] they only do so at night.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khafji


> 30x173mm can no longer kill what it was meant for killing

The GAU-8 can no longer kill top-line Russian armor? Source?


The GAU-8 could not kill T-72s, which entered service during its development cycle.

Everyone fawns over it, but the GAU-8 only had moderate penetrating abilities against T-62s, less against the T-64.

In order to "kill" a T-62, the A-10 had to approach it from very specific directions, at very specific angles of attack. The Soviets knew this so they co-located anti-aircraft artillery with their armor units and any A-10 making a gun run on a tank would have been flying through a hail of anti-aircraft fire.

In order to penetrate a thin sliver of armor on the sides of the T-62, an A-10 pilot HAD to fire from from the side of the tank at "1500 feet away, at 3 degrees of dive, at 320 knots". The Soviets knew this, too.

What direction do you think the barrels of the ZSU-23-4 self-propelled radar-guided anti-aircraft vehicles were pointed, when moving in formation with T-62s?

The PGU-14/B depleted-uranium armor piercing round, the most "anti-tank" bullet the GAU-8 fires, can penetrate 55mm of armor at 1,220 meters and 75mm at 300 meters. There are very few parts of the T-72 that have armor thinner than 75mm.

Also, those penetration figures are for steel. Very rapidly after the introduction of the A-10, the Soviet Union started outfitting all of its main battle tanks with composite armor and additional external armor.

So at best if you pepper a tank with a full magazine of PGU-14/B fired from a GAU-8 you're probably hoping to break its track, poke a hole in an external fuel tank, or puncture its main gun-- not destroy it.

Crews inside modern main battle tanks would probably hardly notice being hit by fire from a GAU-8.

Here is the "A-10 Coloring Book", written by cold war A-10 pilots as a training aid covering how to shoot at T-62. T-62s were only vulnerable from the rear, and thin (hard to hit) slivers along the sides.

https://imgur.com/gallery/fd4sK

The T-64 was harder to kill, and the T-72 almost impossible.

Due to anti-aircraft assets being closely-coupled to Soviet tank formations it was predicted that every single A-10 pilot would be dead two weeks into a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union, and this was 40 years ago.


The GAU-8 was designed to punch thru 76mm armor at 300 meters. [1] The Russian T-90 tank has armor thicker than 500mm. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger#Specifications

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-90


For a bit I thought you might have used the wrong leading digit but it's true:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rfyeR-YaJw


To be clear, that 500mm number is referring to rolled homogeneous armor (RHA) equivalency. Modern tanks use fancy composite and reactive armor to provide incredible protection. It's not actually 500mm thick, but is apparently equivalent to the protection 500mm of RHA would provide.

These sort of numbers are a bit tricky since some anti-tank weapons are more effective against modern armor than others, meaning the armor will have a different RHA equivalency ratings against different kinds of weapons. For instance, per wikipedia, the M1A1HA's turrent is rated for 600mm / 800mm vs APFSDS (sabot), and 1,300mm vs HEAT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_homogeneous_armour#Curr...


Not directly related, but I recently enjoyed this video comparing the latest models of the USA Abrams & Russian T-90 in a tank battle smackdown.


Forgot link to video => https://youtu.be/nnJCYK2F2N0


That's right, the GAU-8 is inadequate for killing modern MBTs, but is complete overkill for any other sort of armored vehicle. It might get lucky and disable a MBT with the autocannon (it may not get through the tanks armor but could still disable the tracks, optics, etc), but really for modern tank killing it would be using something like an AGM-65 Maverick (it can carry up to six.)


>The GAU-8, everybody's favorite reason to love the A-10

Some people love it because it's a high capacity, high accuracy bomb truck. One A10 can provide a lot of close air support with just what's hanging from the wing.


Sure. But it could carry even more bombs if it had an autocannon that wasn't oversized. The fully loaded GAU-8 weighs something like 1/4th the A-10s maximum bomb load.


Our military industry will not occupy itself with making effective, durable, long-lasting, cost-effective weapons.

We must go after the New and Shiny, and it costs billions.

Kind of like a lot in our society.


This is an organizational culture problem and needs a serious push from multiple levels of leadership to adjust. The F-35 started as an idea to actually save money by consolidating multiple missions onto one plane, which proved a terrible idea for multiple reasons and that wasn't cancelled because there would be no other option for some of the roles it should cover.

A simplistic solution would be to design weapons around common, proven components and, if possible, interchangeable ones - designing engines and weapons to have similar mount-points, avionics that can be used on multiple vehicles and be field-upgraded and build everything about as much incremental improvements as possible (yes, I know nothing will make an F-14 a stealth fighter so some big steps are needed, but if the follow-up plane could use similar engines, that'd make logistics much simpler)


And would only cost about ten trillion to prototype and agree on design specs since every three-star+ and every design team/think tank would have a thumb in the pie and design-by-committee would have to market it with the slogan "2100 or Bust!"


That's why it'd need to be pushed from top to bottom with a "unless you have something valuable to add, stick your thumbs somewhere else" message from the top.


I think the real problem here is that land warfare itself is changing too rapidly for anyone to really get on board with developing and scaling a CAS weapons platform.

I read military writers on Quora and the general sense is that it's going to be the Army and Marines that are going to form the backbone of power projection on land. The Marines are shifting their squad composition from 3 teams of four and a leader to four teams of three. One of these squad member's only job is to operate the proliferating tech tools that's becoming available to individuals.

So it's not even certain what capabilities CAS is going to need to have in the near future. Everyone's talking about loiter time, and certainly, that's really helpful, but what about the squad's soon-to-come drones? If that doesn't make the need for loiter obsolete I don't know what will.

A squad with a reconnaissance drone and portable mortars can do a hell of a lot without having to commit an aircraft. What will they need that aircraft for? Carrying weapons that the squad can't. Cue the fighter-bombers.

I can see why the Pentagon isn't chomping at the bit to spend boatloads of money on something they probably won't even need half of by the time they're done.


I mean, I'm sure we could design a fighter that would do the A-10's job better than the A-10. However what the USAF went out to do was design a plane that could replace the A-10, the F-18, etc. etc. all the way through and it's been a disaster from the start.

IMHO, it's like an All-in-One printer. You can have a machine that sucks at a bunch of things, or does one or two things really, really well. Not both.


Double True. They went off in the wrong direction. We need to get back to creating the next generation of fighters that carry on the greatness of the F-14 and F-15. And just forget this all-in-one mistake ever happened.


A-10 is an amazing plane. Keep it, improve on it.


Nice to see someone writing like a Marine.


tl;dr : Replacements in mostly uncontested deployments, with a focus on a relatively inexpensive and easy to maintain aircraft, with additional roles as recon and trainer aircraft. NOT an all-out fleet replacement for the Warthog.


Not sure why you're getting downvoted. None of the replacements (nor the A-10) are survivable in an area protected by fighters or modern SAMs. In the 80's, A-10s were expected to last less than a few weeks in Germany had the balloon gone up.


That seems fine considering all the wars the US has fought in the last 50 years or so have been ridiculously asymmetrical. The USAF has to prepare for a war against technologically equivalent countries, but it also needs to do a much better job at preparing for the wars it's actually fighting right now.


Ah, I think the USAF is doing a fine job with what it's been dealt with. It's made a few procurement decisions that have been a bit questionable, but much of that was driven more by the Executive Branch than the Pentagon.

Airpower is really quite limited. Boots on the ground will always be required, and that's something the US has grown tired of providing.


Weeks? More like hours or days


I was referring to the entire deployed force, and assuming their airbases weren't nuked.


The role for which the USAF used to have the Cessna A-37, also an adapted trainer but twin-jet.

Ironically it was widely exported to South America where the Super Tucano is now cleaning-up as a replacement in the absence of anything else.

Every 30 years the USAF rediscovers the need for a cheap close-air- support aircraft.


> Every 30 years

Interesting pattern that repeats across multiple fields. I wonder how that compares to the average USAF career duration.




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