Hawg166 sent me this, and it was pretty good, so up it goes on the board.
Inside The Pentagon
February 19, 2004
Pg. 1
Air Force Unveils Fresh Commitment To Supporting Ground Troops
ORLANDO, FL -- In perhaps their most striking departure yet from decades of lagging enthusiasm for supporting ground troops, Air Force leaders last week offered impassioned pledges and unveiled new funding initiatives aimed at bolstering land warriors.
Air Combat Command chief Gen. Hal Hornburg, under direction from the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, is studying how to extend service life for much of the A-10 fleet, the workhorse aircraft dedicated to close air support (CAS) for ground forces. The A-10 Warthogs likely will receive new and more powerful engines as part of a larger “bridging” strategy to ensure existing aircraft will remain usable longer, given a recent slip in the schedule to introduce the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) into the fleet.
The new A-10 initiative follows an interservice dust-up last summer in which critics alleged Hornburg’s staff was studying ways to retire A-10s early (Inside the Pentagon, June 5, 2003, p1).
“We’ve got to keep the A-10s on line until that JSF delivers,” Gen. Gregory Martin, head of Air Force Materiel Command, said in a Feb. 12 interview with ITP.
Air Force leaders are now making a virtue out of necessity, going well beyond the practicalities of mitigating the JSF setback to reach out to the land component in new ways.
“We believe it is important that our land forces see us demonstrate our obvious commitment to air-to-ground support, both deep interdiction and close air support,” Air Force Secretary James Roche said in a Feb. 12 speech to an Air Force Association symposium here. “We intend to be fully integrated with them, whether they are SOF [special operations forces], Army, Marines or coalition land forces. With this strategy, we will solidify our goal of developing evolving joint air-to-ground doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures.”
In his own speech a few minutes later, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper said the air and land components had done a poor job of coordinating before a major battle in Afghanistan in early 2002, Operation Anaconda (ITP, Oct. 3, 2002, p1). In meetings he initiated later that year with his Army counterpart, the two leaders realized they needed to “make sure that we understand clearly the way [the] other goes to war,” Jumper said.
He said generations of Army officers exercising at the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, CA, had watched Air Force jets fly overhead from nearby Nellis Air Force Base, NV, but had little idea what air power offered.
“Because [Army leaders] wanted to make sure that the ratios between the opposing forces on the ground . . . and maneuver elements of the Army units being tested were in the right ratio, air power was never allowed to have an effect on the opposing force,” Jumper said. “So generations of Army officers, what they learned was that they can look up and see the airplanes but they never did anything good for them.
“We’re going to fix that,” Jumper vowed. “We’re going to exercise our air and ground together in ways that assure that our Army leaders understand, they know, what air and space power can do for them.”
“We want to make sure that the Army and other land forces know that we feel very responsible . . . for making sure that we’re doing everything we can to make them successful,” Martin said in last week’s interview.
The Air Force recently decided to buy the Marine Corps’ short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (STOVL) version of JSF, in addition to its earlier planned fleet of conventional JSFs. Martin said the new version will be particularly useful in support of ground forces, given it would be able to access smaller airfields closer to the ground fight.
Roche said his service would work with Congress to add a buy of the STOVL variant, stressing the growing importance of “short-takeoff-and-landing” capability. “These aircraft will be as special to our ground force colleagues as are the A-10s today,” Roche said.
Although the quantities and timing of this procurement -- like the A-10 modernization -- are subject to Hornburg’s bridging force study, Martin said his service has assumed JSF would first replace the F-16 fleet, before retiring the Warthogs. Hornburg expects to complete his study by July or August, in time to include its recommendations in the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2006 budget plans.
Hornburg told reporters Feb. 12 some have proposed using the Warthog modernization program to “create an A-10 on steroids.” Improvements may give some of the A-10 new avionics, better datalinks, greater precision weapons capability and new engines, he said. An initial effort to boost A-10 capabilities was unveiled in 2000 (ITP, Nov. 9, 2000, p1).
A new engine would likely use an off-the-shelf core, aimed at giving the A-10 a higher thrust-to-weight ratio, Martin said. More powerful engines would lend the A-10 “better performance in some of the areas that were [lacking] -- high-altitude [flight], heat, and heavy weapons loads,” Martin said. “I don’t think that you’ll get much speed out of it, but you’ll get more efficiency in its engines, more thrust. Which means you have better maneuvering potential against threats.”
In his speech, Roche highlighted close air support as a mission area receiving his special attention lately.
“Our airmen on the ground have been the key to many of the combat successes we’ve witnessed in Afghanistan and in Iraq,” Roche said. “Through their eyes-on-the-target assessments, they provide one of America’s significant asymmetric capabilities, and dramatically increase the effectiveness of our support to land forces.”
He noted that through the Air Force’s 2-year-old Battlefield Airman project, the service had reduced the weight of the ground controller’s standard 160-pound kit by half. The Air Force has also replaced much of the outdated equipment these forces use to help guide pilots’ munitions to ground targets, he said.
The new gear uses “machine-to-machine” communications that “reduce the time it takes to link sensors to shooters by 40 percent,” Roche said. “And we will equip these airmen with gear for every environment in extreme.
“We are investing in man-portable, tactical [unmanned aerial vehicles] to extend their sphere of influence and greatly increase their situational awareness,” he continued. “We are committed to providing them with power sources which last far longer and are significantly lighter.”
Roche said he and Jumper also envision “a near-term future where these combat controllers can designate a target precisely up to 10 kilometers away, automatically communicate those precise target coordinates to one of our aircraft, and receive expected time of weapons arrival in a confirmation message.”
This “focused investment, these new approaches and newer ways of thinking will enable us to produce a set of capabilities that will expand our Air Force portfolio of military advantages,” Roche said.
He also paid tribute to the A-10 in ways only rarely heard over the years from Air Force leaders. In contrast, the aircraft has been universally popular in the Army, where its ability to fly low and slow allows pilots to clearly visualize the enemy, distinguish adversary from friendly forces, and use a powerful 30 mm gun to hit both moving and static targets.
“Our A-10 fleet has served us well,” Roche said. “Our ground forces appreciate its capabilities and the airmen who bring these capabilities to their fight. Its ability to be based in proximity to land forces in battle, often in unimproved circumstances, its resistance to FOD [foreign object debris], its robust self-protection, and the skill of the airmen who fly it close to their ground colleagues in direct support of firefights are good reasons why this capability is appreciated.
“It is right, then, for us to commit to the near-term improvement of a portion of this fleet and to evolve this mission area over time,” he continued. “So we will call from the A-10 force some number -- yet to be determined -- of aircraft in the best condition for sensor system upgrades, re-engining and service life extension, to bridge the force to the new F-35 close air support fleet.”
Roche also touted the F/A-22 Raptor’s potential contribution to land forces.
“The F/A-22 will serve to support distributed ground forces deep in enemy territory. [It will also] assure air dominance, attacks against moving targets, as well as cruise missile defense -- all critically important to ground operations,” he said.
Hornburg was also asked to study options for long-range strike, which may include an F/B-22 -- a stretch version of the service’s top-priority Raptor aircraft.
Martin said the Air Force’s renewed commitment to ground forces “should have come through clear in the close air support [initiatives], clear in the Battlefield Airman [project], and clear in the capability discussion about long-range strike.”
Given the possibility of additional schedule slips in introducing F/A-22 into service as well, Hornburg also plans to retrofit older F-16s and F-15Es with new radars, and convert some F-15Cs into strike versions. Designed principally for the air-to-air mission, the F-15C will also receive a better central computer and radar improvements to update its capabilities, Hornburg said in a Feb. 12 roundtable with reporters.
The ACC chief would not rule out the possibility that additional procurement of F-16s or F-15Es may be necessary if there are further delays to the F-35 or F/A-22. But Hornburg said he hopes not to have to implement any such contingency plans.
-- Elaine M. Grossman
<img src="http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/sigs/snipersig.jpg " border=0>
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
