Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire US Air Force, are we reaching too far?

Two were shot down at the beginning of Desert Storm. One by a SAM, the other by AA fire...

The problem with the DoD budget is the Generals and DoD forget where the money comes from. They think it grows on trees It comes from us, the people and they have no concept on how to spend it wisely. The same is happening with the A-10 and the Blackhawk verses the Huey. The money comes from we the people and the DoD and the Generals need to make due with what we have before they get anymore.

kwg

This is where Jimmy Buffet sings "Why don't we get drunk and screw?"

You miss some points. I never said anything about giving up a technological advantage, I just think the advantage we have gained is akin to a 3 year old stepping in the ring with George Foreman. Now if that edge came cheap, that's wonderful. But the F-22 is 8x the cost of our most expansive 4th gen. And our 4th gens have an overwhelming advantage over anything else out there. I'm simply saying perhaps we didn't need to reach quite so far.

The F-35 will come in at somewhere between 150 - 400 mil. At 150, we could live with that, at 400 mil I wonder if the level of overkill is necessary especially given the cost. These aircraft are horrendously expensive and way more capable than we actually need.

You are taking my points as black and white, you talk like I'm advocating giving up our tech advantage and that's not what I'm advocating at all. I'm merely talking about significantly lowering cost for greater numbers of aircraft that are still many times more capable than anything our enemies have.

Hell, they need to be making new A10s, as nothing does what that does... Jorge, correct me if I am wrong, but is there a real world replacement for the job the F 14 TomCats or the A6 Intruder did?

We only have 100 B 52s left in inventory.. darn things are 50 plus years old...over 740 were built... why aren't we building those things again...

drones are great, but I don't see them replacing Piloted A/C totally by a long shot...

and growing up in the cold war as a military dependent, I have spent a lot of time on military bases in my life...new technology was constantly being made and entering inventory...

but it was afforded because, this nation wasn't spending billions annually for people to sit on their living room couch and watch TV all day and get fat and get stoned...and not contributing a thing to society...

Before the program is all said and done, it will be closer to the 150mm number. You have to remember how .gov computes the cost, which includes the amortization of all R&D and development costs across the number of aircraft built. The MARGINAL cost of each additional aircraft is even less then the 150mm number. Likewise if we kept building more F-22's the cost per airframe would of been reduced by this effect as well.

It's called an F/A-18 Hornet and a lot better than anything the French would ever dream of building (and everyone knows how much I despise the Hornet)

Not even close as a fighter.

no sir. The F/A-18 F is in my view an F-14D with less capabilites and there's nothing out there that replaced the A-6E, then again, munitions technology has alleviated some of that (although in Yugoslavia, the absence of the A-6 and FB-111s seriously degraded our all-weather capabilites), but we really blew it financially with the A-12 (and now the F-35). What we should have done (in 1996) was continue to build the F-14D with the Tomcat 2000 follow on, the A-6F and maybe Hornet Es, then continue the R&D for their eventual replacements. What happened, the A-12 was a disaster, basically leaving the Navy with only F/A-18s (and it's variants) as the only game in town, that even today, they can't match what a Tomcat was capable of.

once again, government efficiency at its finest...

waste a lot of money and end up with something inferior to what it is suppose to be superseding...

There is no reason that the money spent on development of new A/C should cost a fraction of what it does.. ( re $600 hammers and $1200 toilet seats type of expenses)...

and here we have had plenty of good A/C that technology hasn't advanced beyond, for the job they do.. and the development and tooling costs were already paid for...yet instead of making new ones, they spend how much upgrading high mileage airframes...

and this one A/C theory for multiple roles.. McNamara tried that way back in the 60s trying to develop the F 111 to be used by the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines...to save a buck.. and that turned out to be a financial disaster instead...

they never learn...

meanwhile our pilots end up with high buck junk that is a jackoff of all trades and master of none, yet costs a fortune to maintain...

Seafire: A couple of points to ponder: The infamous 600 dollar hammer is the fault of the Congress to be precise, and I'll illustrate: When they Navy approached Grumman to build the F-14 (or any other airplane by any other service applies), the cost of the airplane is offered either singly or for a volume buy.

Although the navy wanted and purchased 1200 plus Tomcats, the Congress would only allow for YEARLY purchases of say 40-50 units, with no follow on gurantees, so the price of the jet practically tripled. And even more expensive is the required logistics parts train, that would have been infinitively LESS expensive in a larger bulk buy.

As to the aircraft, remember that one of the most (if not THE most) successful jet fighter of all time, the F-4 Phantom served both the Navy and USAF very well, not to mention over two dozen air forces and the Royal Navy as well.

But not all the services had a hand in, or more accurately a finger in the pie, of its development. It was a Navy aircraft that the Air Force decided it liked. Even the Air Force versions still had the things like the heavy gear and the tail hook. It is easier to go from an aircraft developed for naval use to air force use than vice versa.

All the services getting involved in the initial development of an aircraft is a recipe for disaster.

The F-15 line is still open too. The best F-15s ever built are being sold to the Saudis and a few others right now. Upgrade the engines, the avionics, and add a few goodies like thrust vectoring and the F-15 would be the equal of the F-22 in most ways except stealth and have the advantage of being the most proven fighter air frame in service right now.

Thanks Jorge...

I am familiar with the lower expenses by buying in volume.. covering Government Accounts for years ( although not selling military jets... )

the comment on the $600 hammer is just an "example" or almost a saying to describe governmental waste....

I pretty much grew up around the F4 Phantom on Air Force bases, so I know them well...but the Phantom was an A/C that was ordered by the Navy that the Air Force ended up ordering afterwards....

In the case of the F 111, the Air Force was ordering those first and McNamara wanted to make the Navy take them also, instead of whatever A/C they actually wanted...

So the point I poorly attempted to make in my analysis, is that Naval Requirements can easily fit or be adapted to Air Force needs, but not the reverse....

The Air Farce has long runways.. the Navy has to have something they can fly off a carrier deck...

But my opinion has always been, that Naval Aviators are statistically superior to the average Air Force pilot... I am sure Air Force jocks will argue that point all day long...

A/C should be developed for Naval use first, if they want to save money and make multiple services use the same basic airframe...

Besides as the world is changing, the Air Force is going to become the Chair Force with all the drones and their capabilities.. missiles etc...

Where as the Navy, still has the need for airpower, operating from Carriers anywhere in the world...if we are going to maintain being a world power, although I believe Obama is trying to undermine that as much as he can...

And as someone else was posting on the A10s, the Air Force complained about them all the time.. where as the Army would love to have those babies, and I bet the Marines would also...

The importance of the Air Force being a separate service is quickly becoming obsolete...

excuse me now while I put on my flame suit and wait for all the Air Force vets on the Campfire here to show up and lynch me on line here...

I kind of doubt that. Maybe in the grand scheme of things. But in this day and age of shrinking budgets, probably not. The logistical hurdles and all the money that would have to be spent would probably make it too expensive for the army.

Now, if they were to allow the army to field something like the Super Tucano that could be operated from most of the fields on army posts already and could be much more easily serviced? Yeah, they would probably go for that.

I realize the F-4 was a Navy initial buy, so was the A-7 but yes I agree multi-service buys are a recipe for disaster, enter the F-35..

You read about some of the exercises we've done with some of the Europeans and the Indians and the like with the latest types. There is some chatter that they had done very well against the F-22. Of course, the chatter from our side says differently but it is also always followed up with the refrain, "Well, so what. In real combat the F-22 would have killed those guys before they even knew it was there."

Okay, so it seems that most of the advantages of the F-22 and almost all of the advantage of the F-35 lie in their BVR capabilities. Well, whoop-de-fricking-do. We have never fought an air war where we allowed our aircraft to shoot down potential enemies without making visual identification. The F-14 could shoot down aircraft at 100 miles in the 1970s, but that capability was of little use in anything short of Armageddon against Russian bombers because of our rules of engagement.

So, are we really going to send our F-22s and F-35s out to hot spots to get into knife fights with Su-27s and the like where most of their advantages are gone?

It would seem to me that the original High/Low mix we had envisioned needs to be tweaked. They didn't build enough F-22s. So, the F-35 is going to have to take over some of the High mix. Really, what we need is a High/Middle/Low mix with the F-22 on top, the F-35 in the high middle/ and something like an upgraded F-15 on the low.

The F-22 as a knife fighter has no equal. NONE. BVR is nice and there's just no comparison between the 1970's Phoenix (bomber only)and today's AAMRAM. ANd I am still of the opinion we need to build more quantity than super expensive-sophisticated stuff ONLY. Then again, I'm just a Johnny come lately...

I prefer foreign interloper these days. I think it is how I shall refer to you with your permission, of course.

Sure!but you forgot "statist". Time to change back my avatar..stand by.

As to your point about the F-22 being a knife fighter, well, I'm sure that is true, but there aren't enough of them. The plan with the F-22 as I always understood it was to whittle the adversary down at BVR so that he runs away or is in manageable numbers when the knife fight starts. As it stands with rules of engagement we have and their very limited numbers, they could find themselves overwhelmed. They are so few that normal maintenance redlines, a few lucky shots, a few getting damaged in normal accidents that always happen, could put a quarter or half of them out of business. There is no margin for error.