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2023-08-31 Science & Technology

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Posted by lord garth 2023-08-31 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [11124 views ] Top

#1 Yeah, every team gets a 'strapped-on' drone operator for CAS. I'm not seeing it.

Posted by Skidmark 2023-08-31 00:03|| 2023-08-31 00:03|| Front Page Top

#2 "...drones half the size and one-tenth the cost of an A-10 armed with 10-12 smart missiles replacing most of the A-10"s mission capabilities."
*Uh-huh* I heard the same 'transformation' hocus pocus about the F-35 and the LCS... a whole lotta 'mosts' about how they will do better than proven concepts ... and cheaper too!

Posted by magpie 2023-08-31 00:20|| 2023-08-31 00:20|| Front Page Top

#3 To me its a Law of Diminishing Returns' thing -- the best designs are small, task specialized and cheap enough you can kamikaze it if you don't have any better payload. The more 'bells and whistles' it has the less you want to actually risk it. Not to mention how do you handle EMCOM and ECM in a peer or near peer conflict ...oh, you make an expendable drone more expensive.

Posted by magpie 2023-08-31 00:26|| 2023-08-31 00:26|| Front Page Top

#4 How much did the taxpayers spend on the decade long rewinging project?

Followed by upgrades to the avionics.

And now it's obsolete?

Posted by EMSArtifact 2023-08-31 07:21|| 2023-08-31 07:21|| Front Page Top

#5 B52 is still flying, the M2 aka "MaDeuce" is still in service. Somethings are just fundamentally designed right.

Posted by Procopius2k 2023-08-31 07:22|| 2023-08-31 07:22|| Front Page Top

#6 The A-10 may be old but like a previous comment, some things are just right. Do agree the Air Warden has its place but like anything the Air Farce touches, there has to be some gold plate added. The cockpit armoring is essential but look at some of the other things that are not for a CAS platform.
And please for God’s sake, stop the ‘F-35 can do the Watthog’s job’ spewing……..
Wanna cancel something, start with that overpriced toy and buy more F-22’s.

Posted by USN, Ret. 2023-08-31 07:32|| 2023-08-31 07:32|| Front Page Top

#7 None of this would be happening if Martha McSally, the "senator from A-10" had been elected...

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-08-31 07:45|| 2023-08-31 07:45|| Front Page Top

#8 ...Mr. Hog is, sadly, coming up on the far end of its survivability curve. I worked Hogs and bow to no one in my admiration for them, but we need to look at reality. It was the perfect weapon for the GWOT, but in a peer-vs.-peer war, they will be in mortal danger.

Also, to USN, Ret.: Interestingly, the tooling for the -22 was 'accidentally scrapped' not long after the decision was made to prune the program. Somebody at DOD - or higher - was bound and damned determined to drive a stake through the Raptor's heart, and that was the best way and surest way to do it. Without the tooling you can't do rebuilds to keep 'em in service longer, and you can't build any for the Australians and Japanese, both of who seriously wanted some.

Mike

Posted by MikeKozlowski 2023-08-31 07:47|| 2023-08-31 07:47|| Front Page Top

#9 we need to look at reality

Well, some people more so than others...

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-08-31 07:48|| 2023-08-31 07:48|| Front Page Top

#10 As much as I love the Hog - like you couldn't guess from my call sign here - I too have to admit it's role as a primary front-line asset is over.

Relegate to air shows and the like and let it retire with a thumbs up and fond memories.

Posted by Warthog 2023-08-31 09:34|| 2023-08-31 09:34|| Front Page Top

#11 I think it's time to break the "Key West" agreement and turn close air support over to the Army. Along with the budget for it.
Let the blue sky boys stop pretending they care about the ground outside of an air base.

Posted by ed in texas 2023-08-31 10:38|| 2023-08-31 10:38|| Front Page Top

#12 As an 11B, I loved the Hog. Watching them live fire was an amazing experience. I was very much against retiring it during the GWOT as it was a perfect platform for the anti-insurgency operations over in the sandbox.

But those days are over and as the skies over Ukraine is proving, the days of the dedicated CAS aircraft is coming to an end and... gods it hurts to say... so is the end of the A-10. The future will have swarms of remote and AI automated cheap drones that can hit an armored column and wipe it out. Still a place for attack helicopters, as long as they can fire from cover like the Longbow (AH-64D Apache) with its radar on top that can guide hellfires into targets where the rest of the airframe can stay behind cover. But other CAS birds are gonna die if they pop up.

Posted by DarthVader 2023-08-31 11:10|| 2023-08-31 11:10|| Front Page Top

#13 ^ Exactly! The MANPADS are getting smarter and smarter so the days of the persistent, loitering CAS bird or helo are coming to a close -- for the moment because who knows what technological marvel will reverse that trend? The A-10, AH-64 or even some converted crop duster are just "a target" and when directed energy weapons get better ...*shudder* the saying is 'it flies it dies' unless you hug the trees sneaking in and out.

Posted by magpie 2023-08-31 11:47|| 2023-08-31 11:47|| Front Page Top

#14 As an ancient ground-thug with infantry and armor background, I have a certain fondness for stupid, kinetic weapons. So my KSA's are way out of date and limited. Given that, it seems to me if it is smart enough to fly independently, it is expensive to produce in mass quantities. If it requires external comms to control it, quantity is less of a problem but it is ultimately jammable by some form of emission. Directed energy seems a great new tool for ground attack and air defense, but the power source demands impact land mobility.

After the initial swarm, counter swarm, and heaps of really expensive and complex wreckage from the crust engagements, it seems likely that the winner of a protracted contest will still have more and better guys with things that go bang and ka-boom where somebody aims them, and the ability to put them where they are needed, when they are needed. Just saying....

Posted by NoMoreBS 2023-08-31 12:27|| 2023-08-31 12:27|| Front Page Top

#15 The future in contested airspace is unmanned. You may see a return of high-performance interceptors firing hypersonic air-to-air against bombers or cruise missiles, but it makes no sense to risk a pilot in a situation where an expendable munition can be delivered cheaper, faster and more safely.

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-08-31 12:30|| 2023-08-31 12:30|| Front Page Top

#16 MM, how hard do you think is to jam UAV to operator communication?

Posted by Grom the Reflective 2023-08-31 13:08|| 2023-08-31 13:08|| Front Page Top

#17 Thanks for that info re: tooling, Mike. That seems to happen quite frequently: referring to B-49 Flying Wing, P-6 SeaMaster
, sr-71, F-14, and sure there are others.

Posted by USN, Ret. 2023-08-31 13:28|| 2023-08-31 13:28|| Front Page Top

#18 Re jamming, there will be downlinks from sats that won't be easily jammed from the ground. Measure / countermeasure is an ongoing contest, not a "checkmate, your done" scenario.

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-08-31 13:30|| 2023-08-31 13:30|| Front Page Top

#19 #18 Provided the surprised side survives the surprise.

Posted by Grom the Reflective 2023-08-31 13:35|| 2023-08-31 13:35|| Front Page Top

#20 how hard do you think is to jam UAV to operator communication?

I have experience with this and the answer is "Depends".

A civilian drone, piece of cake. They operate on very narrow and known frequencies and it is easy to overwhelm them on those.

Military, especially with frequency hopping technology is a different story. Jammers work by flooding communication frequencies with white noise so the target can't talk/see/target anything. "Burning" through the jamming is finding out what frequencies are being jammed and tuning your equipment so the noise is filtered out. With the radio equipment the west uses that frequency hops (and is encrypted), it is much more difficult for a jammer to jam all the radio possibilities that can be used. Best bet to defeat military drones is ground fire and EMP. Don't know how well the last one would work next to your electronics, but the engineers can figure something out.

Problem with a jammer that just blasts all frequencies is not only does it take a shit ton of power (radio waves are converted from electricity to electromagnetic waves, so more waves=more power) and you would have to have it hooked to a city power grid, but it would also keep you from talking/targeting at the same time as your shit would be jammed. Russians actually had a problem with this at the beginning of the war and turned off their jammers allowing the Baykar to cause havoc as it was jammed before.

So in short, it can be done depending on platform, but the engineers are working on ways to get around it.

Posted by DarthVader 2023-08-31 14:24|| 2023-08-31 14:24|| Front Page Top

#21 OK, retire them. Give them to the Army like was planned before the first Gulf war. I'm sure the Army will have great uses for them.

Posted by 49 Pan 2023-08-31 14:28|| 2023-08-31 14:28|| Front Page Top

#22 Another problem with jammers is they are giant beacons to HARM ordnance, screaming "Here I am!"

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-08-31 14:40|| 2023-08-31 14:40|| Front Page Top

#23 Well, I'll leave it to the guys in Rafael.

Posted by Grom the Reflective 2023-08-31 15:20|| 2023-08-31 15:20|| Front Page Top

#24 EMP bursts will quickly identify drones that have been hardened and those that have not and the contractors who cheated on the contracts. Hardened drones are not going to be 'cheap'.

Posted by Procopius2k 2023-08-31 19:19|| 2023-08-31 19:19|| Front Page Top

#25 As some posters have noted about drones: More Features = Higher Cost. Another thing that bothers me is the worshipping of the Goddess of Stealth while forgetting the major problem that stealthy vehicles work best alone. At some point as the sky becomes cluttered your stealthy vehicle is likely to be spotted, interfered with or shot down because the other side was shooting at someone else. Besides as soon as you start firing you stop being stealthy.

Posted by magpie 2023-08-31 20:43|| 2023-08-31 20:43|| Front Page Top