Noah Shachtman explains how to get a new air force, without going broke:
- Stop using expensive-to-fly B-1B bombers to do drones’ work.
- Scrap the Marines’ Harrier-like version of the Joint Strike Fighter.
- Invest in new weapons rather than new planes.
- Design a new long-range bomber.
- Pick a tanker, finally.
Some of the comments:
- At this point, just count on everything in the air force being robots/drones 20 years from now: tankers, bombers, fighters, everything. Start all the programs from scratch with new requirements, and plan on holding a small manned fleet in reserve in case we have a Battlestar Galactica situation with the Chinese, mideast or Russian hackers.
- I’ve often wondered why they haven’t paired GPS guided ground munitions (either artillery or rockets) with UAV targeting. It costs a lot of money and fuel to fly heavy ordinance around all the time just in case they need it. Why not keep it all on the ground, and keep unarmed long endurance, fuel-efficient, lightweight UAVs in the sky? If they had GPS guided shells, which I know they’ve been working on, and fire bases spread out across the country you could drop ordinance anywhere. You could have practically unlimited quantity and a wide variety of munitions (cluster, low-collateral damage, HE etc). This seems way more efficient and effective than wearing out billions of dollars of high tech aircraft taxiing around bombs that are usually never dropped.
- One main comment: by focusing on hardware, you make yourself part of the problem. Ignoring processes, services and governance is what has gotten the USAF to the sorry state it is now in.
- I was reading on BBC the other day (I forget exactly when), and the defense department had released the first robotic bomber (fighter bomber?). It looked fairly stealthy too. Said something along the lines of being able to pull many more G’s than a manned version. So basically in the future if you’re a fighter pilot, you don’t want to get anywhere close to the robotic craft. Therefore you’re going to be in a larger craft with missiles to fend off the robotic ones, keep them at range. Looks like the advantage of the human will be in making decisions that have to take other criteria into account, or deciding what is important when focusing attention on things. A human fighter pilot would then also have to manage a drove of drones in the space around his craft (friendly drones).
- In the military there is one simple rule: “Use it or lose it”. Meaning that they fly the missions so that they burn enough fuel so that they dont lose that fuel for the next month. Trust me I was on AWACS (96-00) and that was a primary reason we flew so many unnecessary poorly coordinated training missions.
- The independent AF was a post WW2 concept to support the concept of Strategic Bombing especially when bombers were the primary method of delivering nuclear weapons. Today the nuclear deterrent is delivered primarily by missiles, including a large number of weapons under Navy control. Really the main remaining mission for land based aircraft is to support the Army. Therefore, put the airplanes back in the Army, after all they claim to be the world’s largest AF anyway due to the helicopter fleet.