The USAF screws the US Army once again.
Remember the C-27? The Air Force wrested control of that program away from the Army based on the Key West accords...The Air Force stated that they could manage the program better and would see to Army inter-theater needs...then budget cuts hit and the Army is still without its airplane and the Air Force decided to mothball it.
But wait! It gets worse!
The US Army is trying real hard to be a player in the new Pacific strategy and in order to be a player needs to get its troops to the scene as quickly as possible. What does that require? How about strategic airlift. And what is the USAF also cutting? C-5's and C-130's. Not to mention the A-10's that are a close air support specialist. Want to see the politically correct version of events? Check this out from DoD Buzz...
As for the other aircraft the Air Force wants to go away, many of them are cargo planes. It plans to get rid of 27 C-5As, 65 C-130s and all of its C-27Js. They’ll probably end up with the A-10s, F-16 and F-15s in the Boneyard at Davis-Monthan AFB. Most of those aircraft could soon be harvested for parts, but Schwartz said airmen will protect the C-27s for now.My boy Elements of Power will disagree, and I can't wait to hear from him but if we're really talking about "jointness" then the USAF needs to get a bit more serious about its air lift responsibilities...oh and a second look at retiring the A-10 might be in order too.
“Type-1000 storage is essentially recoverable storage,” he said. “You don’t use the airplanes for spare parts. You don’t pick and choose and cherry– pick, which type-2000 storage allows you to do. So obviously, type-1000 storage is more expensive. It requires sort of ongoing surveillance and so on. So that — the disposition is not final-final, but those are the options.”
Air Farce? Screwed Army? Golly.
ReplyDeleteKey West Accords need to be scrapped and the entire A-10 inventory moved to the Army. Give Army the A-29 Super Tucano program as well.
Almost be willing ti give up the ACV if the corps picked ip the A-10s.
ReplyDeleteBut the again I'm a scout observer now
I have no position on this one. Didn't see a need for the C-27 that couldn't be filled via other means in the first place (especially now that demand in Iraq is way down), and the individual Service 'cuts' weren't made in a Service-only vacuum. You can bet your bottom dollar the cuts were negotiated between the Services to try and avoid the second-guessing after they went public, but you can never get buy-in from all the consituencies. By way of background, the AF might not have even wanted the C-27 in the first place if some in the Army hadn't squawked about turning the trash hauler into a gunship. If you take a look at the history of cross-service transportation support, you will find that until the establishment of USTRANSCOM, the AF has been better at fulfilling its obligations for Air Transport better than the Army for Ground Transport and Navy for Sealift. In Desert Storm, USTRANSCOM was still getting its hands around the different needs having been formed only a couple of years (3-4?) earlier and it showed in the times and gyrations it took to get the heavy forces in-theater. Some(not all, just the noisy boneheads)in the Army whine about others 'non-supporting' of their fill-in-the-blank desires because their culture still suffers from the 'everyone else is support' attitude.
ReplyDelete+1 SMSgt Mac.
ReplyDelete