Posted on 11/05/2009 5:48:47 PM PST by Liam2007
AC-130 Gunship stalking its Taliban prey. Note: Sound on, good radio chatter....
(Excerpt) Read more at weaselzippers.net ...
War Porn Ping
OUTSTANDING!!! This should make the news...but won’t.
Nice.....
I have long been suspecting that the future of the air force is in less high technology and more towards durability and numbers.
For instance, in the last decade or more, the most valuable bombers were not the advanced stealth aircraft, but the old, reliable workhorses, the B-52s, last built in 1962. And yet, if we had new, production line B-52s, with modest upgrades for ease of maintenance and greater fuel efficiency, they would soon be in the skies year round.
The same rule in the future could apply to UAV aircraft. If made cheap, just a flying engine, fuel tank and weapon, with literal fly by wire guidance, and a cheap computer brain with GPS, they could be as inexpensive per unit as a small car.
Even if they just mounted a machine gun, while a half billion dollar high tech fighter aircraft might be able to take out a dozen of them, if there were two dozen in the air, the high tech fighter aircraft would lose. And if they only cost $20,000 each, for the price of that one high tech fighter, you could have an air armada of 25,000 UAVs, easily enough to invade and conquer an entire nation.
Give 5,000 of those UAVs machine guns, and the other 20,000 carry 250 lb. iron bombs to pre-planned targets.
Wow this stuff is amazing. Like a freaking video game. Point and shoot.
Picking off guys in the night from thousands of feet in the air and chasing them down them down the street with bomb after bomb until they get em. Unreal.
An oldie but a goodie.
Oldie but a goodie.
Just how long were you a Soviet Military Planner, Comrade?
How well we remember those Order of Battle meetings in Germany of the 1960s when we had maybe 18 operational fighters, and the Soviets reportedly had what always seemed like 3500 MiG 15's, 1800 MiG 17s, 200 MiG 21's, and about a million guys, and 5,000 tanks.
"Forward men! We've got to plug the Fulda Gap at all costs, until the National Guard gets here from Kansas!"
Need Oxygen, Comrade Pilot? Insert red hose in mouth, turn spigot, regulate flow as needed with teeth. Need to land? Use potato field. Do not worry, your Soviet aircraft has mudflaps on the landing gear. A MiG 17 probably cost less than a Plymouth Convertible.
Examine your point. If there were no nuclear weapons backing up those US forces, Europe would have been in the same situation as was South Korea, where, but for the grace of the Korean Hemorrhagic Fever (Hantavirus), decimating the Chinese army, we would have been fairly easily overrun.
Back to Europe, the US was completely impotent when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 (the latter even being a surprise to the Red Army, which was *expecting* to invade Yugoslavia, not Warsaw Pact friendly Czechoslovakia.) The US just had to sit there and watch.
The Soviets were even cool with the idea of the US and them using tactical nukes in Europe—they had integrated them into their strategy. But it was only those big strategic nukes that made them hesitate at all.
As far as numbers vs. quality goes, it has long been a balance in warfare. The US Navy in WWII floated a lot more ships that were much poorer quality (which is not to say bad quality) than the far fewer Japanese ships they fought, that were some of the best ships in the world. Had the US lost at Midway, it would have extended the war, until the US could crank out more ships, but the end result would have still been the same. But literally *every* Japanese combat ship that was lost was irreplaceable.
My original argument, however, was not specifically oriented towards a conflict directly involving the US. Say, for example, a fight between two countries, in which one of them is able to build automobiles, and can convert that industry to build cheap UAVs.
A lot of countries are able to build cheap automobiles. If they discreetly started cranking out low cost combat UAVs, it would put them in the same position to blitzkrieg that Germany had at the start of WWII. It could so quickly and decisively beat another army, even one equipped with expensive, high performance aircraft, as well as take out so much of its ground forces capabilities, that its army could march in mostly unopposed.
This is because of the simple fact that when you *do* have overwhelming numbers, in many situations the only way to stop the enemy advance is with equally opposed masses. That is, meet an air armada with an air armada of your own. Think “Battle of Britain.”
If you want to go on a strategic scale, the best way to look at it is if there was a hypothetical land invasion of China by the United States.
Literally every US lieutenant would be tasked with having to kill one hundred thousand Chinese draftee soldiers, the numbers disparity is so great. If a US lieutenant was killed, another one would have to kill 200,000 Chinese soldiers to make up for it.
But if there was an (not entirely impossible, I might add), war between China and India, in which both sides could easily field infantry armies of 30 million men each, while still an unconscionable bloodbath, there is much lower “casualty parity”.
Numbers of these sorts are very trying to grasp, and I am just using them to illustrate the quality vs. quantity argument—that quality will not always win the day.
The US has long had to rely on quality, because there just aren’t that many Americans. But if were to augment that quality with quantity, we could have an amazing force, and at much lower cost.
Yabut, all too often the "quality" idea gets conflated with "gold plating," weapons systems, driving their cost skyhigh into the realms of minimal obtainability. In the US military lexicon "quality" = "high cost!" B-2 Bomber? Way cool. We have exactly 19.
My own USAF is a major culprit. The idea of fleets of "cheap" reliable UAV's will face massive resistance. Case in point (sort of): the scorn with which the USAF treated the emininently useful A-10 (and the pilots who fly them). Couldn't wait to ship them off to ANG units! Neither did they keep the A-10 idea up-to-date, or ever build enough of them.
We need more and better air support in Afghanistan, right now. Your fleets of cheap UAV's, run by on-the-spot FAC's ... NOT remotely ... would be great ... right down to the platoon level.
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