What Makes An Army Great? Part 3
This is an additional installment in the series of articles considering how the United States armed forces became the dominant military force in the world – not just quantitatively, but qualitatively. Last time I wrote about how the US Army made some inspired procurement decisions in the wake of the Vietnam War and how those decisions paid off in the 1990s and 2000s. But what about the Air Force?
Turns out, they made some smart equipment buys as well, as good or better than the Army’s. That round of aircraft procurement decisions provided the Air Force with the foundation for a world-class fighting organization.
The Air Force stumbled into the air war over Vietnam. It had banked so heavily on long-range missile fire that it fielded a generation of fighters without guns – then found itself in an aerial environment so confused and crowded that it had to close to visual range before engaging to make sure of friend or foe, as a back-up to some pretty good electronic Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) technology. Once that close, the fight became a dogfight, and the Air Force scrambled to get guns back on their aircraft.
The large aircraft losses over Vietnam meant that a new round of aircraft procurement was necessary in any case. Experience in Vietnam persuaded the Air Force that air-to-air capability must be central to any new aircraft design. Even aircraft tasked with ground attack and provided with escorting fighters had to be capable of self-defense – the enormous loses of F-105 Thunderchiefs (382 lost, nearly half of the entire production run of slightly over 800) over Vietnam demonstrated that.
Two new combat aircraft came from that re-examination: the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Falcon. The F-15 was intended as a high-end air superiority fighter. It delivered. It has great avionics, amazing power, can carry lots of ordnance, and has proved easy to upgrade. The F-16 was a more all-purpose fighter-bomber, but its light weight and agility made it a good platform in an aerial fight, and its relatively low cost and ease of maintenance made it a much-exported aircraft. The F-16 became, in effect, the standard all-purpose fighter of NATO in the 1980s and 1990s and remains in wide use today.
The Air Force also adopted the A-10 Thunderbolt II in this period as a dedicated ground-attack aircraft. Its design violated the “air-to-air first” philosophy of the F-15 and F-16 and it is safe to say that the Air Force has had mixed feelings about the A-10 ever since. It is a slow but heavily protected aircraft, enabling it to survive in the low altitude ground attack environment. By the early 1990s, all A-10s had been shifted to the reserve component (Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard), and the Air Force intended to replace it with F-16s optimized for close support. The First Gulf War changed all that. The 192 A-10s that fought in the war turned in such a great performance that plans for the “strike” F-16 were shelved. The A-10 remains in service and will remain so until replaced by the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter was also a product of this period, making its first flight in 1981. Talk about a revolutionary aircraft! It even looked spooky. Few planes in history have so epitomized the application of cutting edge technology. The last F-117 has been retired from service, being superseded by the more capable (and stealthy) F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II, but it left an indelible mark on aviation history.
Finally, and perhaps the most revolutionary of them all, was the E-3 Sentry aerial warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft. Based on the Boeing 707 – one of the great commercial aircraft of all time – the E-3 Sentry changed the face of aerial combat forever. It entered squadron service in 1977 and we are still figuring out new ways to use the capability an airborne radar and command control system provides.
That Was Then, This Is Now
Man, they just don’t build ‘em like that any more.
No, really, they don’t. Something has gone terribly wrong with aircraft procurement since then.
We have new generations of aircraft which are so expensive we cannot procure enough to even come close to replacing existing aircraft as they wear out. The B-2 Spirit bomber has a per-unit all-up procurement cost of over two billion dollars.
Two billion dollars per bomber!
As a result, aircraft buys are tiny – and not because we are starving the military. Our defense budget is larger than that of every other country on the planet combined, and we still can only afford a total of twenty B-2 Spirits. We have been buying a trickle of F-22 Raptors each year, and only managing that – as its cost escalated through the stratosphere – by robbing the procurement funds for the F-35 Lightning II.
The decision this year to shut down F-22 Raptor production and re-channel the available funds into F-35 Lightning II production shows an emerging glimmer of sanity. Unit costs on the Raptor have ended up at over 300 million dollars per aircraft, although if we cranked up the assembly lines and really started grinding them out we could get that down to about 150 million per aircraft. (Oh boy!)
The F-35 is cheaper, more capable in the ground attack role, and is vastly better in air-to-air combat than anything flying, or likely to fly for the next thirty years – with the obvious exception of the Raptor. We’ll be able to make larger buys of F-35s, and that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s a baby step. We need to start making great big steps, and soon.
In 2007 we had to temporarily ground 700 older F-15 Eagles pending upgrades. We are currently in the unbelievable – and to the best of my knowledge unprecedented – position of having an air force which has an average aircraft age older than the average age of the warships currently in service with the US Navy!
Come on, guys.
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