I have heard that same closing punch line attributed to a zillion different sources, including a line by Judd Hirsch in Independence Day. Given that pedigree it's likely apocryphal.
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I have heard that same closing punch line attributed to a zillion different sources, including a line by Judd Hirsch in Independence Day. Given that pedigree it's likely apocryphal.
That assumption is completely wrong, and couldn't be further from the truth.
I SAW that interview and the documentary that contained it, I didn't hear about it from any second-hand source. It was some 20-odd years ago, and if the reply was already a punch-line, or has been ever since, it is irrelevant... It happened.
Another point made in that interview was the cost... IIRC, each B-2 was estimated to cost $2,000,000,000, and was said to be roughly the cost of building an aircraft carrier.
The program stressed the long-term advantage of accurately striking anywhere in the world within 24 hrs without ever needing more than one refueling, and returning to the US homeland...unseen and unexpected... Pretty impressive stuff, even all these years later.
It isn't news that bean-counters and self-proclaimed government watchdogs comb through every budget item that ever sees daylight. It also isn't surprising that extremely expensive black programs are funded by some obviously imaginative bookkeeping.
How else do you dump tens of billions of dollars on R&D, actually build a bomber squadron, and have it stationed and battle-ready, all while being hidden from the public?
Get real... this type of thing is nothing new.
B-2 black project - couldn't find "Wings"
Battle Stations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2bihncjy0U
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsMrgu_7HQc
Modern Marvels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdhLJBKGFMI
Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=godifMGvf6c
B-2 test pilot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xax4q4Ctdh0
je suis charlie
It is better to live one day as a LION than a dozen days as a Sheep.
Thomas Jefferson Quotations:
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
The $600 "toilet seat" story is so far distorted that it is getting pretty close to a lie,
but there is a basis for it.
If you want to know what really happened, I can tell you. Very different, and you
would have had the same cost (they charged $600 and probably lost a bunch of money
on every one) if you had been in charge.
Bill
If it was easy, anybody could do it.
I'd like to hear it, Bill.Originally Posted by MtGun44
There's no substitute for hearing from someone with first-hand knowledge.
I don't believe the F-22 has yet flown a single combat mission. How many A-10s could we have purchased with that development money?
Lots of good points all around, and it's very good to have folks with experience on all sides of the issue to keep us straight. Mostly, I'm with MtGun44 and Gabby, but there's no question about there being graft in ANY and ALL governmental run operations of ALL kinds. Heck! We've even got it rampant in the VA Admin!!! If anyone ever finds a way to eliminate corruption in gov't, especially when it comes to spending, please let us know. As of yet, there doesn't seem to be any way to affect it much except when someone gets caught, and punished appropriately. Maybe what we need to do is ceate a watchdog group? Then, I'm afraid, the watchdog group would get corrupted. There's really not much that CAN be done, in the end, about corruption. If accepting a tolerable amount of it is what it takes to keep us THE super power we've been for a long time now, since WWII, I can accept that, but wouldn't like having to endure the corruption very much. It offends my delicate sensibilities, but survival of freedom and liberty is a LOT more important than my delicate sensibilities!
And if they're doing their job well, they COULD be releasing "bad" info so the enemy will not pursue their own weapons systems quite so diligently, maybe, so .... we never really know if the info we get is real or intended for enemy consumption. This is one of the reasons I just relax and trust those in charge in the military to be the biggest stabilizing factor in chooseing and having our weapons systems developed. These guys USE the stuff that science creates, and their lives often depend on them, so their vested interest is pretty powerful, and really, is probably our best assurance that we're doing what's necessary to maintain our safety and security in the long and short runs. They have a big and awesome job, and no nation's does a better job than we do. I think history reflects that.
What DOES worry me is the way other nations are improving their education systems while we continue to devolve ours. Our whiz kids that develop these new super weapons systems have to come from SOMEWHERE, and this is something we DARE not think we can buy from other nations!!!! We're not growing our garden that produces these grand systems, and the dems are corrupting all the systems of gov't so thoroughly it'd take two terms of the next president just to FIND them all!
And I really think our education system is the biggest concern we have now, maybe even more crucial than the national debt, etc. When we get to a point where we can't create these things any more, we're doomed. And that trumps everything.
Just something to think about.
What do you suppose the survivability of an A-10 would be flying attack runs over the North Korean Peninsula? Then ask yourself. As much fun as it would be to fly an A-10/ Would you rather be sitting in the A-10 cockpit or at a OP station in a P-8 flying fifty miles off the coast controlling a flock of Drones. Which BTW would fly autonomously back to a base for reload. Returning back over your assigned area in a steady stream.
When you look into some of this stuff it truly does look like a future filled with nightmares right out of scifi movies. But why wouldn't it? Personally I am sure modern technology will NOT make war less horrible. Back in the 1920's through early 1930's some fools thought humans would not fight another world war because of the emerging horror of aircraft bombers. Peaceful hearted people just don't seam to understand that our enemies want to kill people. AKA they like and enjoy the blood. So in my opinion. There is no amount of power we can hold or project that will stop the next big war. What power does is get other nations on your side. Like the way you see small nations rubbing elbows with Vladimir Putin after he shows power. Even when that power is abused as he did in the Ukraine.
We not only need to replace the A-10 we desperately need to replace the B-52. Both were new planes when I was a kid. I can recall the B-36. I was out of high school in 1973 when the A-10, F-15 and F-14 were coming out. But now I'm sixty and those old birds are forty. F-14 is long gone. In 1973 if you were talking about a forty year old design. Just think of what we flew in 1933. Plus just think of the massive military Saddam Hussein had in 1991 and how we went through it like it was something from the Roman Empire days. A-10 worked very well. It was the last hurrah of the F-4. It was also a quarter of a century ago. I am sitting here thinking of how the US fleet sailed into Havana Cuba to meet the Spanish fleet sailing out to fight. Spanish had wooden ships we had iron battle ships. Our fleet never had to maneuver. Just blew them out of the water to start the Spanish American War. Been a long time since anyone could win a war with twenty year old technology.
“AMERICA WILL NEVER BE DESTROYED FROM THE OUTSIDE. IF WE FALTER AND LOSE OUR FREEDOMS, IT WILL BE BECAUSE WE DESTROYED OURSELVES.” President Abraham Lincoln
For some scary look into our future. Do a search engine on DARPA, The USA department created back in the 1950's to bring forth new military tech.
http://www.popsci.com/darpa-wants-mo...o-carry-drones
Very important thing to consider is we don't have any patent on the human brain.
Last big war we fought all our AXIS enemies thought they had tech advantage on us. Back then we humanly out numbered them in vast proportion. NAZI Stuka dive bomber worked great against soft targets. JAP had the same plane. Worked for them at Pearl Harbor. My family has always considered our stance pre war as a bait and switch trick.
After all the war did start at just the right time for us to win. Of course our enemies are stupid, right. Not smart like we are.
“AMERICA WILL NEVER BE DESTROYED FROM THE OUTSIDE. IF WE FALTER AND LOSE OUR FREEDOMS, IT WILL BE BECAUSE WE DESTROYED OURSELVES.” President Abraham Lincoln
I would not want to put up an A-10 against a Mig-29 or even an F-16
Tim
Words are weapons sharper than knives - INXS
The pen is mightier than the sword - Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The tongue is mightier than the blade - Euripides
I would fly A-10s against MIG-29s and F-16s anytime, even both at a time... in an Xbox-360 called HAWX.... Absolutely no connection to reality, but a fun game.
Oddly enough, I've actually met a few combat pilots playing that old game... although the vast majority of players are aggressive, blood-thirsty adolescents. lol
Well the Navy A-6 had almost zero air to air ability. It was a bomber. So that is not the point. A-6 could carry two atomic bombs from a carrier in the Med to anywhere in Russia one way. Three times the range of our cruise missiles that did not exist when they were deployed. In theory pilots would turn North after run then land on ice to meet up with C-130's to refuel. Which would be load two more 48's then take fuel in the air for another run in. There is a reason we never fought WWIII with USSR. A-6 was a great plane. So was the P-47. Model A Ford was also a ground breaker for automobiles. Things change and move on.
“AMERICA WILL NEVER BE DESTROYED FROM THE OUTSIDE. IF WE FALTER AND LOSE OUR FREEDOMS, IT WILL BE BECAUSE WE DESTROYED OURSELVES.” President Abraham Lincoln
F22's have, yea. F35s, I don't believe so.
The answer is 0 A-10s. We don't have the manufacturing capability and someone would have to spend a few million reworking all the blueprints to work with modern machinery and probably several billions tooling up a new plant, not to mention sourcing and training the talent.
And then what are you left with? Effectively no air to air capability in a slow easy target that rattles itself apart every time it fires. If we were still planning on flying in to strafe Russian tank columns after quickly taking out enemy air and just relying on the apartment to stop antiaircraft cannons, the A10 would be viable. As is, that's not a mission we're going to fly because mass warfare isn't a thing, and nobody uses AA cannons because modern bombers and fighter/bombers can scream in and drop ordnance faster than a cannon can engage. Everyone has moved to AA missiles, which the A10 can't dodge and is too big and too slow to rely on avionics and electronic warfare to stave them off, so instead of heroically flying through a cloud of flak they'd be shot down quickly.
The A10 is not a CAS aircraft, and trying to make it one qould be as big a waste as the F35. I would caution that the F35 is a problem of constantly changing the requirements, and needing it to be The Best for the next forty years. There's the COTS issue as well. Frankly the F35 is either going to turn around and be fine, or a whole bunch of people are going to get fired.
We need to be replacing the A10 though, and with are mind toward operating more like the USMC MEU model, a battalion landing force than can be on the ground in 24 hours and self-sustaining until the rest of the support shows up. Smaller, lighter, better trained, faster, cheaper, and less dependent on the supply chain. Halliburton and Co don't want that because big wars with a big footprint are more efficient but the reality is that surgical is likely the way forward.
I suggest the Boeing OV10X. Gimballed GAU on the gut with a top of the line EO/IR/ELINT/EW package, long range and hangtime, and standard an docket mounts on the wings. The idea of an docket couple flying squids or Marine aviators in one of those acting as a mini-Spectre while I go hunt for Terry makes me want to stand at attention.
Fixed-wing fast-movers will never go away, and I had to have a friend explain why. I grew up playing first-person shooters, and the thing that can ruin the game is latency, having a slower connection than the other guys. Well, a pilot in the aircraft has 0 latency, he's right there aircraft can respond as fast as his unconscious brain is capable of reacting. A pilot on a ship piloting a drone always has at least some latency, whatever the time it takes for the sensors to zap the signal to the ship and for that signal to be decrypted and read and then that same time lag again for the signal to be beamed back out. Even at the speed of light, that's a hard delay caused by physics, to the tune of a few hundred miliseconds. To put that in perspective, when playing online a ping lag of 200m/s is so jarring that the game is nearly unplayable. You'd get steamrolled in air to air combat.
What I expect to see is more female fighter pilots. They seem to have very good G-resistance, and on average a woman in peak shape has less body mass than a man and is shorter. Weight and size are big factors for aircraft, and someone found that recruiting more women may be more efficient for space exploration as well.
I expect to see more UAVs in support roles, and better communications between the ground element directly to the pilots. Unmanned ground vehicles may become a thing too, like the BigDog but as a transport or evac instead.
I expect to see smaller overall numbers in the military and more focus on the SOF and rapid deployment of small, agile forces, possibly using more light support aircraft to replace native mortars and artillery.
Not a first choice, but the A-10's are capable of firing two Aim-9 Sidewinders and are more maneuverable than most other aircraft
down in the dirt where they operate
- and don't get in front of that cannon if you want to survive in whatever your driving.
The A-10 has heat-shielded engines
(and sundry other countermeasures)
too keep any heat seeker anti-aircraft missiles from having a easy time of sneaking up it's backside.
A-10s sank enemy warships during the 2011 international intervention in Libya
Warthogs even shot down two Iraqi helicopters with their 30-millimeter cannons.
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-02-...7_1_air-combat
Aerial combat game record
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/a-1...2a4#.a1gox7xfd
je suis charlie
It is better to live one day as a LION than a dozen days as a Sheep.
Thomas Jefferson Quotations:
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Air to air kills against helicopters and a really old Mig don't say much for capability. F15s can do all that and far more, and Boeing can whip a bunch of those up for a fraction of the cost of making new A10s.
I don't know what warships the A10 sank, but unless they were impervious to a Harpoon missile or a quick volley of Hydra rockets that's not real high praise either.
I mean, Carlos Hathcock put a scope on an M2 and used it as an antimaterial rifle, but that doesn't make the M2 a precision rifle, just means someone with limited resources got creative. Or put another way, putting a scope and a new barrel on an M16 doesn't mean it can replace an M40 even if someone makes a few kills at 600m with it.
...in the meantime the A-10 is performing the ground attack job admirably....and they wish to cancel it and replace it with NOTHING. The F-35, if it is ever operational, can't do what an A-10 does right now in the battle fields we fight in right now. A 25mm cannon with 475 rounds, less underwing ordinance capability (including the weapons bay). More vulnerability to ground fire if it goes low so it can find the targets it needs to hit.
It seems we have spent the last 65 yrs or so fighting "small wars" against third or fourth rate militaries, with weapon systems that were never designed for the purpose. We design weapons for wars that never happen and saddle our troops with systems that just plain suck. I.E. we sent pilots into VietNam with F-105 Thuds loaded with iron bombs to be cannon fodder for Korean war era Migs. A mission they were not designed for and they sucked at it. Even the F-4, as great a plane as it was went to war with one arm behind its back....no gun and missiles that didn't work. It only managed a one to one kill ratio til we put guns in them and went to 2 1/2 to one.....we did better in WWII with the Wildcat vs the Zero.
The reason the A-10 lives on is there is nothing in our inventory that can do the job that needs to be done half as well. It is fine to plan for future battle fields that we might have to face, but not at the expense of the ones we know we face right now.
Does the AIM-9 work differently when launched from F15
than from A10's?
F-15 don't do low level CAS that I know of
- do you have other information?
I wasn't aware of plans to build NEW A10's,
just upgrading existing A10's with new wings
(due to high G force stress cracks in the old ones
after many years use)
and upgraded instrumentation for Night Missions
to give 24 hour CAS support for our troops.
je suis charlie
It is better to live one day as a LION than a dozen days as a Sheep.
Thomas Jefferson Quotations:
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Actually the Douglas F-15 line has been shut down for a few years now. They were going to build a few F-18's this year but the budget left out funds.
“AMERICA WILL NEVER BE DESTROYED FROM THE OUTSIDE. IF WE FALTER AND LOSE OUR FREEDOMS, IT WILL BE BECAUSE WE DESTROYED OURSELVES.” President Abraham Lincoln
The F15 can get in faster. Nobody us going to authorize an over-the-horizon shot with anything, so the A10's speed is a severe disadvantage. It's not agile enough to attempt real air-to-air and isn't equipped to do the EW/ECM to handle catching return fire.
A10's don't really do low-level CAS well. That gun is massive overkill, and it's okay for what we're doing with it but every hour we put on it is one we don't get back. I mentioned the F15 specifically because the war game against helicopters is exactly what you'd want a multirole fighter for. That was the definition of an air superiority mission, not CAS.
As far as making new ones, others in this thread suggested it. We can make new wings, but the airframes are going down too, and replacing those means building a new plane, which means building a whole new avionics package.
Boeing is still making and refitting F15s for several countries, but that was just an example. Any fast-mover would do. We can keep using the A10's for now, but they're not going to last much longer and if we don't have a replacement we'll be trying to either rope in another bird to cover the gap, or caught with our pants down
Gee, you sound like the USAF General's cheering section for dumping the A10's
- were you /are you USAF fighter material? I see the need for speed in your post.
I see that Boeing is trying to sell the F-15 as Supplement / replacement for F-22 role being the F-22 line was shut down
and it's too expensive to start back up.
http://www.defensenews.com/story/def...ment/72316414/
The high cost of the F-22 aircraft, a lack of clear air-to-air missions due to delays in Russian and Chinese fighter programs, a ban on exports, and development of the more versatile and comparatively lower cost F-35 led to the end of F-22 production.
A final procurement tally of 187 operational production F-22 aircraft was established in 2009 and the last F-22 was delivered to the USAF in 2012.
Guess the old F-15 can do it with the Silent Eagle upgrade to make it stealthier.
Last edited by Artful; 01-25-2016 at 07:30 AM.
je suis charlie
It is better to live one day as a LION than a dozen days as a Sheep.
Thomas Jefferson Quotations:
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
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