Consider.
Every announcement from HQMC and think tanks lauds nothing but praise on two platforms...the F-35B and the MV-22.
Long gone are the days where the Marine and his rifle was the focus of HQMC and those that seek to give advice/counsel.
How is this showing up?
You spend money on whats important. You jettison anything you think is redundant or a waste...this applies double when times are tough. During these tough times what is the Marine Corps shedding? Infantry Battalions, Artillery, Tanks, Tracks and various support units.
What is increasing?
Marine Air.
But wait. It gets worse.
The F-35B is going to be declared operational and not only is the software a mess but not even the gun will be operational. Check this out from the Daily Beast.
The Pentagon’s newest stealth jet, the nearly $400 billion Joint Strike Fighter, won’t be able to fire its gun during operational missions until 2019, three to four years after it becomes operational.So having said all of the above the question must be asked. Is Marine Air going rogue?
Even though the Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35, is supposed to join frontline U.S. Marine Corps fighter squadrons next year and Air Force units in 2016, the jet’s software does not yet have the ability to shoot its 25mm cannon. But even when the jet will be able to shoot its gun, the F-35 barely carries enough ammunition to make the weapon useful.
The JSF won’t be completely unarmed. It will still carry a pair of Raytheon AIM-120 AMRAAM long-range air-to-air missiles and a pair of bombs. Initially, it will be able to carry 1,000-pound satellite-guided bombs or 500-pound laser-guided weapons. But those weapons are of limited utility, especially during close-in fights.
“There will be no gun until [the Joint Strike Fighter’s Block] 3F [software], there is no software to support it now or for the next four-ish years,” said one Air Force official affiliated with the F-35 program. “Block 3F is slated for release in 2019, but who knows how much that will slip?”
Once Marine Air was considered the keepers of the flame when it came to providing close air support.
Now?
They are talking about retiring early (even though NAVAIR says that it can be kept in frontline service til 2030..at least) the AV-8B Harrier...a plane that is proven, can provide the support that the GROUND COMBAT ELEMENT needs but isn't exactly designed to be part of the air sea battle doctrine that the USN and USAF are working on.
Is Marine Air attempting to not only break away from the ground side of the house but while doing so remake the Marine Corps in its image?
Total Doctrine Failure
ReplyDeleteagreed.
DeleteThe F-35 will fire 70mm rockets with the APKWS guidance head providing sub-1m accuracies for either the 10lb M151 or 17lb M229 warhead. Either of which (as single shots) provide roughly the same total explosive/frag effects as a 30-50rd burst of gunfire and far more accurate ballistic scatter from typical (high altitude = long slant) firing ranges. Indeed, APKWS, being a SALH (laser homing) round is capable of <1m impacts while a gun fired from above the threat floor at say 12-15,000ft will put it's rounds into a 50 mil circle that may well be 30ft across.
DeleteThe problem here is that these rockets are carried in pods underwing (they fire forward rather than dropping free) and while the USMC has a stated 'CAS configuration' need for external pylons, the other services do not and so they will not nominally be qualifed under the Block 2b OFP. They could be, very quickly, as test jets already are working on external loads.
The GAU-22 is similarly poorly described. Most modern gun systems have some degree of what is called 'IFFC' or 'Integrated Flight (and) Fire Control' which functions rather like the Tracking Point rifle scope. Designate a target, fly towards it, and as the range and angle off close, the fire control system will automatically generate steering data which, if the pilot follows the datums with the trigger consented, will cause the FCS to engage the gun firing circuit and send rounds down range as the LOS and LOS-R (Line of Sight and Line Of Sight Rates) combine with bullet time of flight to hit the target with a given angle off and distance condition.
In some installations this can even be coupled to the autopilot so that the jet will in fact /steer itself/ as well as fire the gun.
IFFC is vastly more accurate than the best gunzo fighter pilot ever to have walked the earth (Hans Joachim Marseilles comes to mind). So much so that they can even do front quarter snapshots which are forbidden to pilots because of the enormous risk of collision.
With the limited firing window and automatic gunnery solution calculation inherent to jet vs. jet combat (you seldom want to press closer than about 1,200ft for fear of your engine eating what you knock off the other guy's airframe), as well as the lethality of the much heavier 25mm round (compared to the 20mm Vulcan on the F-22 for instance), you can actually destroy a threat jet with as few as three rounds and thus may only fire 10-20 round bursts, 'once per trigger consent' under automatic limiter control on the gun. The MiG-29 and Su-27 guns work this way.
Some 180-220 shells, divided by 20 rounds per burst, gives you a lot more target engagements than 'one full pass' of human controlled trigger pull. Something the USAF would know quite well.
Given the JSF's value is somewhere north of 150 million dollars and it doesn't have a lot of safety features like full fuel tank inerting and a second engine necessary to be safe in a low-CAS trashfire environment, it is ill-considered at best for the F-35 to be using guns anyway, when the aforementioned 70mm rockets reach five times as far with 10 times the accuracy.
DeleteHaving said this, in a dogfight, the F-35 is also quite nosepoint agile, in a single-best-move sense, provided it is at half internal fuel and carrying only A2A ordnance (i.e. the levels at which ALL fighters are type specified for 'dogfighting' which may or may not be realistic for a long range interdictor). Here, the issue is one of the several seconds the jet may need to recover from such a Superman(euver) condition. Vs. the number of guided IR shots that non-EO fighters can employ before the jet ever gets within visual. We are talking 10-15 seconds to recover to corner speed (best combination of rate and radius, for the altitude and mission weight), during which time, the jet is largely a fish in a barrel to proximity fused hand grenades.
Indeed, it is unlikely that ANY jet, flown to it's maximum capabilities, is going to evade an in-envelope SRM shot without the aid of EXCM (Expendable Countermeasures) and/or DIRCM (Directed IR Countermeasures, laser pointed into the seeker to dazzle it).
And when you do such a thing, you advertise your presence for hundreds of cubic miles all around you. Allowing threat wingman or second section jets to shoot you as you recover from gunning the leader or evading his missile shot.
And the F135 engine has a very hot core flow which makes it quite easy to plume track, even from extended distances.
Indeed, given that high energy maneuvering deflects the planform controlled airframe to unusual aspects and sheets it over with fogs of transient water vapor where high Q pressure differentials literally wring the air of moisture, BOTH of which enhance radar return to nearly conventional levels (and once you know where to look it is far easier to hold the track with focussed, high power, tracking radars) it is very unwise to 'dogfight' or engage in any form of high energy ACM (out of plane snapup/snapdown as well) _at all_.
Particularly as panicky SAM operators who have already been treated to several doses of MALD-J and HARM, upon hearing radio traffic or seeing visual evidence of an air combat overhead, are likely to snap on their radars for just a few seconds to shoot at whatever blip they see, whether it is IFF squawking or not, and a salvo of ARH or IRH (LOAL) missiles which are seeker coned at a friendly (threat) jet may well light off their seekers and find you chasing/being chased in the same volume.
BAM. You're both dead.
Stealth is the art of making the shadows darker and deeper, not prancing through the searchlights thinking you're Harvey The Rabbit.
I think the next step of the F35B cool-aid drinkers will be uniting with USN F35ers with the following propaganda line: the Navy F35 will be air superiority and anti-ship (sea-lane control stuff) whilst the USMC pounds all ground with both CAS and Strike missions.
ReplyDeleteThey will both dismiss the lack of the gun due to their BVR capability with the AMRAAM.
Then Lockheed will start talking of how the F35B can also launch off of ships other than LHA's or Carriers. Don't laugh too hard but I bet we may actually see them say the LCS (the "improved SSC version") of supporting F35's for surprise strikes.....this was actually an idea proposed ages ago for the AV-8 (and a good one in my opinion) but rejected as too expensive. But when your aircraft is upwards of 100mil any argument is worth making.
We'll also see the old Sea Lane Control ship resurrected in spades...the LHA America already is basically an SCS since it lacks a well.
Besides the so-funny-it hurts image of the suckiest ship in the navy being paired with the F35b We will also see the MV-22 that is overpriced and unnecessary paired with the 35B as an escort...,Although doubtful, if they can somehow show F35's and MV-22s taking off the LCS then the trifecta of crap will be complete!
they'll try and re-orient the F-35 propaganda to tout its close air support credentials but Dave already threw cold water on that idea when it became known that the EOTS/DAS is less effective than current gen SNIPER and LANTRIN pods. we're not even talking about upgrades almost certainly due to come online in the next 5 years.
Deleteadditionally we haven't seen any papers or talk from the air side with regards to how the F-35B will prove an upgrade to the AV-8B. all they've done is talk sensor fusion for the pilot but diddly squat for the guy on the ground.
So according to this article it will take years to write software code to fire the gun. I'm going to have to call bs on that. Something is wrong here. Either the article is wrong or their entire software development is completely screwed, because writing code to actuate a gun shouldn't be that complicated.
DeleteNo tinfoil hat here but I think it might be Boeng lobby pressing for Advanced Super Hornet, they really want that line to be extended.
DeleteThe F-35 was never intended to be combat ready before the complete deployment of Block 3 software. It's not just code for a gun. Block 3 is required for full flight envelope (speed and G's), it's required for sidewinder missiles, it's required for any air to surface missile, it's required for the networked capability that fan boys talk about like it's been there all along.
DeleteIf you look at all of the initial deployment plans, Block 3 software was required for IOC and it was a single Block 3, there was no 3i/3c/3f. All of the changes, including declaring IOC with block 2, have been caused by LockMart's software development fiasco.
The USMC declaration of IOC is a flat out lie and a publicity stunt driven by their desperate need for good press, not a real IOC. I disagree with NICO on this one: I believe the USMC intent is to JDAM a mud hut somewhere, that could have been hit by Super Tucano with equal efficiency, and then declare victory and vindication as fast as possible.
The code for the gun is tied into the hardware and code for the helmet. If they don't get the jitter, latency and light-leak issues for that solved, the gun is going nowhere.
DeleteThe USMC wants out of the Navy Support game as a wartime deck filler force on conventional carriers.
The F-35B is utterly incompatible with CVN use because the JBD to angle-deck edge is too short while the strung pendants will play merry hell with the landing gear on an SRVL jet that is already so heavy that it eats tires in CTOL (you cannot VL over the side like they do on LHAs when your 1,500` jet blast is coming straight down into the deckpark full of Hornets).
The issue here is that the Marines need a jet that will cause this divorce to become finalized and LM needs a contract to bend Uncle Sugar over a barrel with, similar to the A-12 litigation fiasco: "Oh but you /bought/ the F-35B, how can contract cancellation be for default if you purchased the lowest performing variant? If it's for /convenience/ then...you owe us a lot of closure costs."
I would not waste even a GBU-38 on a mudhut. It would use a Hellfire or an APKWS. And both those are external, forward firing, weapons which just so happen to give the aircraft a serious need for external carriage.
This brings up another issue with the F-35B and the gunpod in particular. It was always (somehow) intended that the Marines would use their JSF for CAS missions in support of beach heads and thus a lot of their ordnance would be externally carried. At least this was the excuse given when they had to shrink the weapons bay to GBU-32 level internal carriage.
What nobody considered was a jet that was right on the edge of being useless in hot'n'hi environments without having to bleed gas down to a level which was unsafe in terms of maritime reserves around the carrier.
Now consider this: The gunpod likely weighs at least 500lbs. Each of the wingpylons and jettison kits another 250-500lbs, depending on weight class.
How do the Marines anticipate loading up more than a fraction of their lightweight CAS ordnance inventory, on VERs or TERs no less, so that they can make more than one pass before heading back to the boat, if the very weapons they are carrying externally ALL subtract from the mission gross, courtesy of the weight of the pylons/pods needed to load them?
Again, guided rockets are vastly superior to guns because they have <1m accuracy from 3km+ and a lot more localized vs. ballistic mil CEP frag scatter, allowing you to shoot from farther out of the slant, away from the trashfire.
But they are _forward firing only_.
The same for Hellfire whose 30lb EB warhead will easily demolish a small building or single floors (sniper nest) on a larger one.
Neither of those ordnance options are internal carry.
At this rate, the army will be replacing the USMC. It's all the fault of the USMC too...
ReplyDeleteno this bullshit that Amos pushed is about to get put back in its cage. we'll lose fast jets before we lose the Corps and thats the real issue. the Marine Air Wing either gets its shit together and stops acting like a little princess or it gets curb stomped, dragged to the river and held under till it stops kicking.
DeleteWell, for the cost of one F-35B, you could have how many SuperCobras or Apache attack helicopters? 35.5 Million per Apache, 31 Million for a new Super Cobra. 250 million for an F-35B.
DeleteI don't know about you, but as a grunt I'd rather have an Apache or Cobra giving me support than any F-35 variant. Especially when you can buy an 8 Apaches or 10 Cobras for the cost of one Albino Elephant and they cost less to fly per hour.....
Usual excuse from Facebook F35 fan boys saying that we should completely forget about it since it comes from an anonymous source and that gun story and fuel too hot have been debunked already.....
ReplyDeletei wonder if a small number of F35 will be used in Syria 2015 to proof it's worth in a real conflict.
ReplyDelete"Marine IOC includes the first squadron, VMFA-121, with 10-16 F-35Bs and enough trained pilots and maintenance officials to deploy for war. The first F-35B unit is slated for its initial deployment in 2017 to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan." Aviation week.
ReplyDeleteUSMC should be "ready" maybe by 1 July 2015 but it would be risky since testing is still going on so much of the F35 and how useful would it really be? USMC could send 10 over there, drop 2 JDAMs for a nice dog and pony show which would thrill LMT, think tanks and fan boys but it would be really risky, if something goes wrong, USMC and DOD would be super exposed to an investigation in why a weapon system still in testing was operationally deployed to a war zone, thus endangering pilots needlessly.....I don't see it happening.
F-111A, Operation Combat Lancer-
Deletehttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/F-111As_Combat_Lancer_1968.jpg
They came, they SEA-saw, they pulled some wings off, but hey! Look at how successful the F-111 program was.
Oh, wait...
I bet if the Harriers are retired early they get run over with bulldozers so they can never be brought back into service.
ReplyDelete@Seal. No doubt. Just like when the Brits cancelled those Nimrod MR4As, they were scrapped so FAST it wasn't funny...
Deleteno mothballing in that gigantic elepant graveyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tuscon, Ariz ?
Deletestated. It was designed to fulfill one mission role only and that was to get the AH-56 cancelled so that the US Army wouldn't start doing Cross-FLOT deep attack that the USAF was too busy tossing nuke shapes to be bothered with.
DeleteCheck all the early drawings. The Fairchild Republic AX is painted in SEA camouflage, carries a lot of dumb bombs and is mounting an M61 in the nose as a new-cheap followon to the Skyraider.
Which was dumb even then because SEA gets hit by monsoon rains for about 3-5 months every year and the AH-56, with FLIR and a terrain following radar pod, could fly and fight through that. The A-10 could not.
Now transfer this mission to Europe. It's 1975 and not out of the question that the AH-56 could stage a comeback (it was and is a vastly superior design, aerodynamically, to the AH-64).
This is the point where the GAU-8 gets stuffed in the front half of the fuselage and in sodoing so torques up the design (literally, the longeron:frame station loads were /bending/ the airframe with the offset gun) that the first 400 or so jets get banged up and are no longer fit for service by about 1990.
Look at Europe itself, as Germany, particularly in winter. There is a two layer cloud system with solid overcast at 15-20,000ft and a running scud which turns to fog and sleet at 3-5,000ft. Often you can't see the end of the active from the taxiway. The jet is slow and has no combat tanks and lacks high altitude performance to make good use of a tanker track. So it _must_ operate from FOLs (Sembach, Ahlhorn, Norvenich and Lepheim are the ones I remember) which are generally within 30 minutes to 2hrs hard fighting from the IGB. Those get overrun and you have no way to keep the jet in 30mm or gas or bombs from 'roadway strips' because it takes 10,000lbs of gas per sortie and dragon loaders weigh about 500lbs and are the size of two rollaround tool chests, back to back.
The jet initially has no INS or moving map or autopilot or even Pave Penny (it gets the first and the last, two years after deployment to Bentwaters). Which means it's flying at 500ft through a maze of high tension lines that dot Germany, with a single pilot looking at a 1:50,000 map spread over his lap and he cannot even count on the jet to stay trimmed for level flight.
The LAU-88 is an electrician's nightmare, the quick draw system which co-slews Mavericks doesn't work and it's very draggy. It also doesn't support the inside Maverick because motor efllux damages the MLG tires (so it.'s a four shot wonder for -50 knots airspeed penalty).
Speaking of speed, the TF34s spool up like a broke down dustbuster running on double A penlight batteries and so acceleration and power loading are so bad that pilots fly the jet at constant full throttle with the boards (speed brakes) part opened and then snap them shut to keep from bleeding ALL their speed under G. This puts enormous stress on the wings which ages out another 200+ jets.
The Maverick missile which the jet depends on to suppress ADV and SPAAGs uses visible light television contrast seekers which, in the watery light of even the German 'high summer', often means they are not able to lock on until the MINIMUM range for the GAU-8 at about 2,500ft. In winter, they are all but worthless.
The AGM-65D, undergoes selective service test in 1978 and again in 1980-81. It is found to be so wanting that they send it back to the labs where it spends the next FOUR YEARS (until 1986) before it is finally issued to the Blue Dragons.
DeleteNone of which matters. Because, unlike SEA, where the SA-7 threat was only a very late newcomer (that still managed to close the HCMT to all AC-130 gunships and many of the T-28 and A-1s types as well), the Russians now have these 10,000 dollar Strelas on every BMP so you can gun or missile all the Shilkas and Gaskins you like but when a dozen MANPADS come flying up at you, you will not have the total number of missile shots to plink all the APC/IFV which are deploying them.
Unlike the A-7 which has dual TFR and pencil beam mapping and a digital HUDWAC, to do night time laydowns at 400 knots the A-10 hasn't got even an NVG compatible cockpit. The A-7 will add LANA pods (in National Guard service no less) in the time it takes the A-10 fleet to /think/ about adding LASTE to keep them from a bunch of CFITs which also plagued the fleet, often fatally, in their training.
As the 1980s closed and the Warsaw pact and then the Soviet Union folded, the jet was still shy of any of the targeting pods or guided weapons which would make the F-15/16 force finally viable as safe, high altitude and night time capable weapons systems, in the middle 90s.
When the A-10 started to catch up (paid for by retiring half the fleet and parting out the best airframes for Hog Up structural bandaiding) it was only to a standard which was exactly like that of the rest of the fleet. Sans radar and HARM and AMRAAM and EFT and decent refueling capabilities.
The A-10 force, now down to about 250 jets, is a myth in search of meaning. Like the Ju-87 and Il-2 in the same mission vein, it is not all that great at what it does but is simply employed that way because nothing else is available.
DeleteBecause the A-10 has to do close-visual support from such short (overhead rather than parallel or offset) ranges that it itself becomes a potential victim and to heavy MG and guided weapons, it can only be used in 'permissive' environments that a real airpower specialist would call No-Threat..
Indeed, the /time/ it takes to do it's thing and come back around again is a good 20-30 seconds longer than the Marine CAS regimen allows for, using jets at cardinal points around the support unit, with targeting pods, PGMs and radar to hit a target and come off in rotation, every 5-10 seconds.
From above the trashfire threatfloor at 400+ knots.
If we had stayed in SEA, the A-10 would have been rapidly driven off by the plethora of light guns, heavy guns, radar guns, radar SAMs and the new shoulder fire weapons. It would have simply been steamrolled and bypassed by the night-movement obsessed, winter tolerant, GSFG.
In ODS it did yeoman's work only because the F-16A/C force was itself total crap when it came to high level (safe) bombing. In the Balkans and OSW/ONW, it was simply not the jet for the job because of weather and threat issues.
Today, taking anything up to 5 minutes t climb out from a single gun pass in the higher density altitudes of Northern AfG, (there are ridgelines the A-10 cannot fly over, once it gets beneath them while loaded up) and having limited datalink + radar ability to play the Fast FAC game (which is really Killer Scout/SCAR), the A-10 is loved by the grunts solely because the threat they are facing is too primitive to even have a DShK type threat baseline.
If the A-10 tried to pull any of it's low angle strafer nonsense over Syria with just the ZPU-2 equipped technical and late model SA-18 Grouse/SA-24 Greyhound MANPADS in use by the FSA, we would be having a Kim Campbell event every day.
Conversely, Precision CAS -can- be done from altitude, it can be done better there and with ROVER III it can be done within safety limits defined by the ground units with compatible terminals. The A-10 is not comfortable at height. It's always overworked (high BPr = low core thrust, vulnerable to changing density heights) engines struggle as they age to perform here and the wings of the jet are simply not made for transonic flight around 20K and up.
The F-35 may not be the A-10s ideal replacement (I would vote for the MQ-9 here) but the A-10 has had it's day and say and it is not compatible with a post Cold War force structure that is half it's prior size but facing very capable, Near Peer, threats like the PRC and Russia.
I really don't understand how they see the F-35 replacing the A-10, nor the F-18. I can definitely see it replacing the F-16 and the Harrier. Couldn't they put in another bid for a more proper replacement for both the A-10 and F-18? Asking so much from one plane seems ridiculous, like it was doomed from the beginning.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't we make a carrier variant of the F-22 to replace the F-18? That would seem more suitable, and just give the Navy the F-22. I'm sure the Air Force would get over it and eventually see the benefits. So really we would only need a replacement for the Warthog, which is an incredible CAS plane on it's own.
A proper new design for the A-10 is in order and overdue, and it should be based again around the the gun and/or multiple guns.