Showing posts with label A-10: Killing the Hog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A-10: Killing the Hog. Show all posts

03 August 2016

Killing the Hog (VI)


This is the 8th in a series of postings decrying the Air Force’s plan to kill the low cost, hugely successful, combat-proven A-10 — affectionately known by its pilots and the grunts it supports on the ground as the “Hog.”  The AF game plan has been to replace the A-10 with the hugely expensive, unproven, problem-plagued F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The A-10 is the only airplane ever designed specifically for Close Air Support — i.e., supporting ground troops in close combat in time sensitive scenarios, where discrimination between friend and foe is crucially important.  In this mission the A-10 is peerless, but the Air Force does not like the CAS mission, because it subordinates the AF operations to the ground commander’s intentions.  This assignment of control flies in the face of strategic bombing theory, which claims you can achieve victory thru air power alone — and strategic bombing theory, dear reader, is the basic case used to justify the bureaucratic imperatives and huge budgets of an independent Air Force.  
Readers unfamiliar with A-10 and the background issues surrounding the never ending debate to kill the Hog will find earlier postings at these links:
The intervention of Congress temporarily has thwarted the AF game plan by directing the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E) to conduct a realistic fly-off and shoot-off between the A-10 and the F-35. The sensible goal of this approach is to use the scientific method to determine empirically which plane is more effective in supporting ground troops in combat.  Currently that test is scheduled for 2018.  That the Air Force was forced by Congress to conduct such a common-sense test is a telling message in itself.  
But there is more.  An A-10/F-35 fly-off in 2018, while well intentioned and entirely appropriate, is also a charade.  The F-35 will not be cleared by 2018 to carry and fire the weapons appropriate for the Close Air Support mission, including its necessary command and control avionics.  Even if one makes the patently absurd assumption that there are no more delays in the problem-plagued F-35 program, the OT&E report evaluating the F-35’s capability to carry and fire these weapons in anything approaching a realistic CAS scenario will not be available until 2021.  How can the F-35 pass a fly-off/shoot-off comparative CAS test against the A-10 before we know what, if any,  CAS capabilities are possessed by the F-35?  To ask such a question is to answer it, so don’t expect any meaningful fly-off/shoot-off to be conducted in 2018.
Nevertheless, this mismatch between the F-35’s availability and capability, has not deterred the AF from its goal of trashing the A-10 — literally.  
Notwithstanding, the speed bump imposed by Congress, as my good friend James Stevenson explains below, the AF is making the retirement of the A-10 in favor of the F-35 inevitable by quietly destroying those A-10s now in long term storage.  There are currently 291 A-10s in active service, with another 99 A-10s in storage in the Arizona desert (including 50 recently modernized A-10Cs with gobs of flight time left on them).  But the Air Force is sending these stored aircraft (including A-10Cs) to the breakers.  In so doing, the AF is deliberately reducing its ability to maintain the existing active A-10 force structure over the long term. 
In short, the quiet AF strategy of destroying perfectly good A-10s guarantees the F-35 will replace the A-10, thereby rendering Congress’s direction for a fly-off/shoot-off irrelevant.  This makes a mockery of the powers assigned to the Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution — a document every member of the AF has sworn unconditionally to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Chuck Spinney
  
Why Is the U.S. Air Force Dismantling Some of Its Stored A-10s?
Old Warthogs should remain flyable
by JAMES STEVENSON, War is Boring, 3 August 2016
[Re-posted with permission of the author.]
The U.S. Marine Corps, tired of waiting for the continuously-delayed F-35B, has gone to the Arizona boneyard to retrieve some of its preserved, first-edition F-18 Hornets to fulfill its close air support obligation to protect Marines on the ground.
Mindful of the aphorism “willful waste makes woeful want,” the Marine Corps preserved its F-18s in the boneyard just in case it ever needed them again.
Some of the preserved F-18s [in the “boneyard.”]
The U.S. Air Force, not feeling a similar obligation to protect U.S. Army soldiers on the ground and arguing that the F-35A can perform close air support as well as the A-10 Warthog can do, is now claiming it cannot afford the A-10s because it needs the money to support the forthcoming F-35A.
With a mentality reminiscent of Vietnam thinking — “We had to destroy the village to protect it!” — the Air Force is dismantling some of its stored A-10s.
Stored A-10s at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, or AMARG, at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Photos via the author
***
Even the warning from the popular musical Hamilton — “Don’t throw away your shot!” — is not enough to get the Air Force to reflect on the possibility the thin-skinned F-35A might not be up to the job of getting down low and slow to save soldiers’ lives.
The U.S. Air Force paid Fairchild Republic to build 716 Warthogs and 291 of them were still in service as of June 2016. As of late July, 49 A-10A and 50 A-10Cs were sunbathing at the Arizona boneyard.
The “C” version is an upgrade to the airframe that gives the airplane an additional 8,000 hours of flying time and new avionics. For reasons that remain unclear, the Air Force is destroying stored A-10s, even some of the A-10Cs, many of which still have thousands of hours of life remaining.
I wrote to the Air Force to ask for detailed information about the stored Warthogs. Terry Pittman from AMARG declined to answer all of my questions. “We consider this information to be for official use only,” Pittman wrote.
But Pittman did say that the Air Force has removed parts and engines from many of the stored A-10Cs. “Most of these aircraft have experienced some reclamation of critically-needed parts.” Just 20 A-10Cs in the highest category of preservation are exempt from “cannibalization.”
Why the Air Force decided not to leave their dormant airframes preserved in the Arizona sunshine is difficult to comprehend, as even the Navy’s ancient F-8 Crusaders, which have not flown since the 1980s, have remained intact at Davis-Monthan.
Because the A-10 has specific capabilities for protecting soldiers in combat, it has many defenders within the Air Force. Some brass have attempted to silence their voices.
“If anyone accuses me of saying this, I will deny it … anyone who is passing information to Congress about A-10 capabilities is committing treason,” Maj. Gen. James Post, then vice commander of Air Combat Command, told a group of pilots in January 2015.
This concept of “treason” appears to be part of the Air Force’s culture, an ethos that abhors the more difficult and dangerous mission of providing close air support and brands anyone who disagrees with its doctrine of strategic bombing — one that dates back to the 1920s — as a traitor.

An A-10C with many of its parts stripped
Way back when the Air Force was known as the Army Air Service, it believed it could identify vital cogs in an enemy’s infrastructure that, once destroyed with with “pinpoint” bombing raids, would compel the enemy to surrender.
That mentality endures. In the mid-1980s, Chuck Spinney, then working in the Pentagon for the Secretary of Defense, prepared an issue paper that suggested it was time to begin studying a follow-on replacement for the A-10, one with an improved thrust-to-weight ratio for greater acceleration, longer loiter time and smaller size, while still retaining all the benefits of the A-10’s basic design — particularly its powerful gun and high survivability.
The deputy secretary of defense approved the issue paper, but Lt. Gen. Merrill McPeak, a few years from becoming the Air Force’s chief of staff, objected.
Spinney suggested that McPeak go down to Tampa, Florida, where Lt. Gen. Pete Quesada lived in retirement, because Quesada was known for his brilliant tactics supporting troops on the ground during the invasion of France in 1944.
McPeak declined the offer. “I wouldn’t talk to that traitor,” McPeak reportedly said.
“McPeak clearly meant that Quesada’s insistence on subordinating air operations — and a share of the Air Force [bomber] budget — to the needs of Army grunts in a ground battle was equivalent to being a ‘traitor’ to the Air Force’s ideology of victory thru air power alone, via its theory of strategic bombing,” Spinney told me.
“The thrust of McPeak’s point was philosophically identical to that made by Gen. Post when he used the word ‘treason’ almost 30 years later to characterize any Air Force officer’s verbal support of the A-10 to anyone in Congress,” Spinney added.
As the A-10 continues to attack ISIS in the Middle East, it strains credulity that the Air Force would consider destroying the newer, upgraded A-10C. But culture is a strong, and even when faced with a threat like ISIS, the moral imperative to reduce the probability of Army soldier dying from lack of close air support is not enough to make the Air Force put American lives before its doctrine.
This follows because the Air Force still believes it can identify the vital centers whose destruction will cause an enemy to lose its will and capacity to wage war. Of course, if that were true, the Army would not have needed to invade France on June 6, 1944.
James Perry Stevenson is the former editor of the Navy Fighter Weapons School’s Topgun Journal and the author of The $5 Billion Misunderstanding and The Pentagon Paradox.






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11 February 2015

Killing the Hog (V)


Air Force Headquarters Declassified and Released Incomplete Data to Further A-10 Smear Campaign
Mandy Smithberger, Project on Government Oversight, February 9, 2015
http://www.pogo.org/our-work/articles/2015/af-hq-declassified-and-released-incomplete-data.html
[Readers can find all postings on this subject at this link]
Air Force headquarters is getting desperate to dump the A-10. Congress has demonstrated strong support for keeping the A-10 and is skeptical of the Air Force’s attempts to retire the platform. An Air Force general even accused any pilot who tells Congress why the A-10 supports troops so effectively in combat of committing treason.
Now, to further muzzle any honest debate about providing adequate close air support for our troops, Air Force headquarters cherry-picked and then declassified selected statistics for USA Today—all to tar the A-10 with having killed more American troops and Afghan civilians than any other plane. Those cooked statistics excluded—and kept classified—data that is essential for a basic understanding of the issue.
The key issue Air Force headquarters obscures is the rate at which these tragic losses occur. Obviously, some aircraft have flown far more attack missions than other aircraft. For instance, the A-10 has flown 4.5 times as many firing sorties as the B-1. However, the critical number is not the total soldiers and civilians killed and wounded, but the ratio of those losses to the number of sorties flown. Without this crucial rate, which the Air Force downplayed or excluded entirely, you can’t determine the likelihood of friendly or civilian casualties or which plane types are least likely to inflict these terrible losses.
Even when you look at the Air Force headquarters’ doctored statistics, it turns out the A-10 is significantly safer than most of the other planes. Only a total misreading would suggest that the A-10 is the plane most dangerous to friendly troops or civilians. For example, the data sheets the Air Force prepared for the press showed the A-10 had a “.3%” rate of incidents causing civilian casualties, which was the second lowest rate of any aircraft.
Using the same data sheets and long division, you quickly find that the A-10 suffered 1.4 civilian casualties for every 100 “kinetic” (weapons employed) sorties. The B-1B bomber, the platform Air Force headquarters always touts as the preferable alternative, had a rate 6.6—nearly five times worse than the A-10. Every other aircraft except for the AC-130* also had rates well in excess of the A-10, but neither the Air Force nor available reports even hinted this was the case.
So how did Air Force headquarters cook the numbers? For one, the numbers were cooked by time frame. The chart comparing civilian casualties starts in 2010, conveniently excluding the 2009 Granai Massacre in which a B-1 killed between 26 and 147 civilians and wounded many more. The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission estimated 97 civilians killed, which the Department of Defense has not disputed. Including 2009 would have made the B-1 bomber the worst killer in theater by far.
For the fratricide data, on the other hand, the Air Force incongruously extended the time-frame back to 2001. If they had used the same time-frame, the B-1 bomber’s killing of five American troops in 2014 would have made it top the list for fratricide.
Second, the Air Force’s data doctoring went so far as to exclude all wounded U.S. troops, all killed or wounded allied troops, and all wounded civilians over the same time period. Including these statistics would have collapsed their case against the A-10. If the Air Force included all friendly killed and wounded, three aircraft would have caused substantially greater total fratricide losses than the A-10. This was also an obvious conclusion from the released data sheets, but not mentioned in the press reports.
Finally and most importantly, to make sure no one could compare aircraft using the crucially important friendly casualty rate per 100 sorties, the Air Force withheld as classified the number of firing sorties each plane flew during the fratricide data period (2001 to 2014)—notably the same data they declassified for their civilian casualty chart from 2010 to 2014.
Using these declassified 2010 to 2014 sortie totals and corresponding civilian casualty totals for each plane, simple long division yields the following table of casualty rates for each plane.

Platform       Civilian Casualties per 100
                              Kinetic Sorties
AC-130                         0.7
A-10                             1.4
F-15E                           1.6
F-16                             2.1
F-18                             2.2
B-1                               6.6
AV-8                             8.4

The table makes it clear that the A-10 is the safest airplane in Afghan combat, except for the AC-130. In fact, the A-10 produces nearly five times fewer civilian casualties per firing sortie than the B-1 bomber, even in the artificially truncated 2010 to 2014 time period. But when you consider that the A-10 makes at least two to three times as many firing passes per kinetic sortie as the B-1 bomber, the comparison becomes even more lopsided, with the A-10 causing at least 9 to 13 times fewer civilian casualties per effective firing attack than the B-1 bomber.
As for friendly troop losses, when and if the Air Force is forced to release this still-classified data on sortie totals for the fratricide data period, it is almost certain that the A-10 results will be similarly lopsided.
Air Force headquarters is engaged in an all-out campaign to use any means possible—including threatening servicemembers and doctoring data for the media—to bolster its failing argument on Capitol Hill to prematurely retire the A-10. Retiring the A-10 gets rid of an Army-supporting mission Air Force generals despise and protects the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program from a combat-proven competitor.
As part of the nation’s obligation to provide the best possible close air support for our troops in current and future battle, it is essential for Congress to investigate whether or not the A-10 is essential to the safety of the people who are fighting our wars and to prevent Air Force headquarters from recklessly retiring any additional A-10s until the truth has been determined. Congress needs to ask the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to gather and assess the available combat experience of ground troops plus the complete combat data, all fratricide and civilian casualty data, and all kinetic sorties. The GAO should then report back to the House and Senate Armed Services committees before they mark up the new defense policy bill. In addition, these committees should hold hearings on the A-10 controversy and include witnesses with meaningful combat experience—and not limit its hearings to witnesses hand-selected by Air Force headquarters—to accurately testify and provide the needed facts for and against the Air Force’s troubling effort to deprive our forces of the A-10’s unique capabilities as fighting continues in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
What we don’t need is more doctored and incomplete information from Air Force headquarters to sell their dumping of the A-10.
*We originally published that this was the KC-130, based on Air Force data that mislabeled what should have been the AC-130.

Image from the U.S. Air Force.
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09 February 2015

Killing the Hog (IV)


In addition to being an outrage in itself, the A-10 scandal is becoming a poster child for what ails the Pentagon in general -- i.e., a domestic political economy that puts hardware before people and ideas (see Killing the Hog III).  The attached report in the Arizona Daily Independent adds more ammunition to both conclusions.  
Chuck Spinney

USAF desperation behind A-10 friendly fire death message
ADI News Services, February 9, 2015
http://www.arizonadailyindependent.com/2015/02/09/usaf-desperation-behind-a-10-friendly-fire-death-message/
“They follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” ~ Joseph Goebbels, Third Reich Minister of Propaganda
An article in USA Today regarding the United States Air Force’s A-10 and friendly fire incidents has caused a fire storm across the military community. The article, A-10 warplane tops list for friendly fire deaths, by Tom Vanden Brook, appears to many to be a desperate attempt by the USAF to discredit the craft just as it is being hailed by enemies of ISIL.
Tony Carr, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross and writes in the popular, military blog, John Q. Public, describes the article as a “lamentable piece of journalism, with Vanden Brook perhaps unwittingly advancing a despicable bundle of lies on behalf of the unnamed officials who made him their message mule.” [CS note: See Killing the Hog (III)]
Senator Kelly Ayotte, a staunch advocate for the A-10, issued a statement in response to the piece: “Every death of an American or allied service member or an innocent civilian is a heart-breaking tragedy. No aircraft that conducts close air support missions — which by definition involve the close proximity of friendly and enemy forces — is immune from fratricide. But as our ground troops and Joint Terminal Attack Controllers will tell you, the unique CAS capabilities of the A-10 have saved hundreds of American lives.”
“Unfortunately, the Air Force is again making selective use of data to support its misguided, dangerous, and premature divestment of the A-10—a divestment that ignores the advice of the overwhelming majority of Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) who know close air support best,” concluded Ayotte. … [continued]

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08 February 2015

Killing the Hog (III)


Previous Postings
Attached is an awesome rebuttal to the Air Force’s plan to retire the A-10, known affectionately as The Hog.  The author, Tony Carr, is a retired AF pilot.  Carr dispassionately dissects the extent to which the Air Force leadership is lying about the performance of the A-10 in combat to justify its decision to send the A-10 to the boneyard.  These lies do a disservice the AF pilots flying highly effective combat missions in the A-10 — but they also shine a bright light into the murky problem that makes managing the Defense Department so intractable.  
The skunk fight over whether or not to kill the Hog may look like just another insider issue over a favored hardware toy in an arcane Pentagon budget battle. But it is also a revealing case study highlighting the moral relativity lying at the heart of the bureaucratic pathologies plaguing the Pentagon.  
Carr explains how bureaucrats and Washington insiders are pulling out the ethical stops by manipulating effectiveness statistics to justify their decision to trash the A-10.  While Carr does not say so, their cynical effort aims to place the interests of (1) the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (reflected in this case by the AF leadership’s unbounded lust for shoveling more money into the high-cost, problem-prone, behind-schedule F-35) and (2) the AF's institutional prerogatives before the clear combined-arms needs in an ongoing war.  The name of the AF game is to suppress  information revealing what really works and what does not work in combat.  
This kind of bureaucratic gamesmanship — which unfortunately is all too typical in all the services — goes to the heart of the behavioral pathologies that repeatedly produce the un-auditable programmatic shambles that is the Pentagon’s five-year budget plan.  This shambles takes the form of (1) a high-cost modernization plan that can not buy enough new weapons to modernize the force on a timely basis (e.g., in this case, the F-35), (2) continual budgetary pressure to reduce existing readiness to bail out the floundering modernization program (e.g., in this case, trashing the A-10), and (3) corrupt accounting system that makes it impossible to sort out the information needed to correct the first two problems (explained here).  The A-10 debate is also a window into the behavioral pathologies that have turned the relatively small, low tempo, never-ending Global War on Terror (when compared to Korea or Viet Nam) into the second most expensive war in U.S. history.

Tony Carr, John Q. Public, 7 February 2015
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and veteran advocate. He served globally as a pilot, staff advisor, and squadron commander, logging several hundred combat hours in Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.

The A-10 is a superb weapon, but it doesn’t fit into the Air Force’s vision of the future. The service has committed itself to getting rid of the warplane, and will stop at nothing to make it happen.
“Lie: to create a false or misleading impression.”
“Win: to achieve victory in a fight, contest, or game.”
There’s a game afoot, and the Air Force is lying to win it.
The game is the annual round of sanctioned government chicanery attendant to passing a defense budget. The Air Force’s objective in this game is to rid itself of the A-10 so it can re-purpose the funding it occupies for other priorities. After failing in previous attempts to achieve this objective, the service is engaged in a take-no-prisoners effort to make it happen, and is willing to leave its integrity at the door in the process. This is extreme and regrettable behavior from an institution that claims integrity as its guiding value. What explains the willingness to betray that value?
The service says the A-10 issue is all about money, and that is has no choice but to pursue the jet’s retirement. Getting rid of the A-10, so the argument goes, is necessary to free up budget tradespace for modernization, particularly funding of the F-35. But this doesn’t really explain the willingness to resort to dishonest tactics. For that explanation, it’s necessary to think about motive.
Contrary to the Air Force’s insistence, this isn’t just a routine budget issue. This is about ridding itself of a Close Air Support (CAS) mission it doesn’t want — a function it doesn’t consider to be part of its core duty to national defense. The campaign to retire the A-10 has been ongoing for two decades, and misrepresenting its contribution to national defense has been part and parcel of that campaign.
But the current debate has occasioned a particular episode unique in its sheer mendacity, which gestures toward a more deeply-rooted intent. After being humiliated on the A-10 issue over the past several budget cycles, senior officers seem to be letting emotion trump reason. Double-dealing of this nature reflects an almost vendetta-level desire to re-establish control and squelch opposition by any means necessary. Recent attempts to chill A-10 debate within the service by marking its advocates with the stain of treason is further evidence.
The latest signal that enmity has overtaken reason among service leaders is the recent article by USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook, caustically (and disingenuously) titled “A-10 warplane tops list for friendly fire deaths.” This is a lamentable piece of journalism, with Vanden Brook perhaps unwittingly advancing a despicable bundle of lies on behalf of the unnamed officials who made him their message mule. .... continued

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30 January 2015

General Post’s Mexican Hot Platter


There are indications and warnings (I&W) that the U.S. Air Force is headed for the rubber room, at least if the attitude of Major General James Post, the Vice Commander of Air Combat Command is an I&W of the Air Force’s corporate attitude.  

As I said in an earlier blaster, the AF hates the A-10 for deep-seated cultural reasons and has been trying to trash it since it was the paper A-X in the 1960s.  But its recent efforts to kill the A-10 to save the troubled F-35 have degenerated into the bizarro world of cognitive dissonance.  For reasons explained below, this development raises medical questions that may open up a new lucrative area for psycho-pathological research.  

General Post recently told Air Force officers that any A-10 pilot communicating the virtues of the A-10 to a member of Congress is committing “treason.”  Marine Corps infantrymen, who are not subject to Post's definition of treason, have told me time and again that the A-10 is by far the most effective air support they can get in Afghanistan; bear in mind, this is coming from people who do not think much of the Air Force.  At the same time, sources with connections in the Air Force tell me that the pressure on A-10 pilots to shut up about the A-10's virtues has been increasing since Post enunciated the new legal doctrine.  Moreover, I have been told by one reliable source that this pressure is especially intense on those A-10 pilots who are now flying missions against ISIS.  So pilots bragging about the airplane they are flying in combat are committing treason if that airplane is the A-10, but not if that airplane is an F-15, F-22, F-16, or (hypothetically) an F-35.  

More generally, to be effective, General Post’s legal prohibition must also apply to newly retired officers who flew the A-10 in Afghanistan as well.  That is because recent retirees are subject to recall in a state of emergency and are therefore still technically part of the Air Force (and the U.S. has been in a state of emergency since the Korean War).  That being the case, Post’s prohibition places the recently elected Congresswoman Martha McSally on the horns of a dilemma: According to the Air Force Times, McSally is a recently retired Air Force colonel and a former A-10 pilot and squadron commander with 325 combat hours in Iraq and Afghanistan; and she has been openly bragging about the A-10. Being recently retired, she is technically still subject to recall, so she is still bound by legal restrictions of the UCMJ.  Therefore, according to Post’s legal doctrine, McSally will be committing treason if she talks to herself or other fellow legislators about the virtues of the A-10.  Senator Ayotte from New Hampshire also must be careful.  She is married to a former A-10 pilot, so it would be wise not to talk to her husband about the virtues of the A-10, unless she is trying to establish legal grounds for a divorce. 

There may be one silver lining in this weird episode, however: In WW I soldiers suffering from battlefield fatigue were shot for cowardice in the British Army.  Since then, people have come to recognize correctly that combat fatigue, or PTSD in modern parlance, is a psychological wound that should be treated with the same empathy as any other combat wound.  

General Post’s outburst suggests that PTSD may be too narrowly defined.  His behaviour suggests a form of PTSD could also result from the stress one is subjected to in the Pentagon's budget battles.  This possibility would open a vast new field of mental research. If true, perhaps Post would be able to increase his retirement pay by retiring on a disability, and not have to go thru the revolving door to the makers of the F-35 in the defense industry to augment his retirement.  

For traditionalists, there is, however, a competing old-school diagnosis:  General Post is just another bureaucratic asshole who autoenchiladed.  This is the time-honored Pentagon term-of-art that hardened veterans of budget combat use to describe a self-inflicted wound that is caused by the psychological equivalent of taking in a Mexican hot platter thru the wrong orifice; i.e., where the enchilada, smothered in hot sauce, wrapped in barbed wire, is self-inserted into a very painful place.  


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03 December 2014

Killing the Hog (II)


Related posts:


 President Obama’s sacking of defense secretary Chuck Hagel began a particularly messy ‘end-of-administration’ kabuki dance in Versailles on the Potomac.   This link will take you to a very insightful interview explaining the nature of this spectacle.  

Ian Masters (of the excellent radio show Background Briefing)  talks to Pierre Sprey* about the third-tier selection of the industry-friendly Ashton Carter** to replace Hagel.   But there is much more.  The discussion quickly spins off into a wider discussion of the dysfunctional politics of the American Empire and the permanent war economy, before it ends  with a brilliant discourse on the Air Force’s plan to kill the A-10 Warthog.   

Sprey knows what he is talking about.  He understands Pentagon politics as well as anyone I ever met.  An engineer and mathematician, a highly accomplished bureaucratic infighter, Sprey was a principal member of the design team that over came massive Air Force resistance to create the highly successful F-16 and A-10 jet-fighter bombers in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Robert Coram’s, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War).   

In the case of the A-10, Sprey was the both the inspiration and guiding force in its conception and design.  He was also the key strategist the bureaucratic battles to stop the Air Force from killing the program — battles that began in late 1960s, when the A-10 was a paper airplane have continued intermittently to this day, including the current efforts by the Air Force to kill the A-10 over the objections of the Congress.  

I urge you to take 20 minutes to listen to the discussion between Ian Masters and Pierre Sprey. 
___________
* Caveat emptor: Sprey is a long-time associate and close friend of mine. I have had a front row seat in the peanut gallery or been a minor player in the A-10 wars from the time I was a 2nd Lt in the AF in 1968 until I retired from the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2003.  So I freely admit that I am proudly biased both with regard to both Sprey’s work and the A-10.
** Apparently Carter is also taxi-cab friendly.  On 12 February 2009, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reported that Carter's nomination to be Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition ran into obstacles, because of financial questions about Carter's past activities, including a "government reimbursement for taxi cab ride he took from Washington to his residence in Massachusetts." (H/T Mike Lofgren, author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted and the seminal essay Anatomy of the Deep State.)


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02 December 2014

Killing the Hog


Obscene Butchery in Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac

Related posts:


The AF intends to prematurely retire the most effective close air support plane in the world — the A-10 Warthog, known affectionately to its supporters as “The Hog.”  Its effectiveness in real war is unquestioned by those in the best position to know the truth: the grunts on the ground who need help in deadly firefights.  Over the years, I have talked to many soldiers and marines with combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all who have seen the Hog in action attest enthusiastically to this unique effectiveness.  Even the AF commander in the First Iraq War, General Charles Horner, said publicly at its conclusion, “the A-10 saved my ass.”  The Hog’s effectiveness in real war is not some arcane point in the printout of a theoretical computerized effectiveness model — it is a fact.


Yet in the middle of another war, with lives again at stake, the Air Force is literally telling Congress and the American people to believe that a bird in the hand (the A-10) is worth much less than a bird in the bush (the F-35) — i.e., the AF is making the outrageous claim that spending hundreds of millions to keep the combat-proven effectiveness of the A-10 in the fleet is less important than spending tens of billions for the unproven, hypothetical effectiveness of the over-cost, behind-schedule, underperforming, problem-plagued F-35, which if its schedule does not slip again, will not have an initial operational capability before 2019.   

If Congress goes along with the AF plan to kill the Hog, it would explicitly affirm the sick set of priorities that are the central corruption in the Military-Industrial-Complex (MICC): namely that the MICC is a domestic political-economic faction willing do anything to shovel money to itself, while hypocritically wrapping itself in the flag of sacrifice and patriotism of others.  By making the 'Hog kill' the law of the land, Congress would affirm that the MICC's corrupt value system is more important than the welfare of the troops Congress claims to support and the taxpayers it claims to protect. 

More important is the symbolism of the kill: It would affirm in the clearest way how the MICC has become the nightmare version of the kind of faction James Madison warned about in Federalist #10.  It is a nightmare, because it is out of control, in ways even worse than President Eisenhower suggested in his farewell address.  The MICC preys on the cracks and fissures in Madison's sacred system of checks and balances, in a way that Madison could not have possibly imagined, as I explained in my 1990 pamphlet, Defense Power Games.  That is why the A-10 has become the poster child for the MICC at its worst.  The corruption is front and center for anyone with a discerning mind and a desire to see the MICC’s value system for what it really is.  

Andrew Cockburn* explains brilliantly in the LA Times op-ed attached below how this obscenity is now unfolding, and he shows how the Congress is showing signs of going wobbly.  

Thanks to Cockburn, that poster child is in full view before Congress votes; but Congress is in need of some corset stays to stiffen its spine; it remains to be seen if propping up high cost MICC boondoggles at home is more important than fielding low-cost weapons that work in real war.
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* Cockburn is a long time friend of mine.

Chuck Spinney


Op-Ed Saving the Warthog to save troop lives
THE A-10 Warthog, whose program may be cut, has drawn praise for its close support of ground troops. (Staff Sgt. Jeremy Wilson / U.S. Air Force)
By ANDREW COCKBURN, Los Angeles Times, 2 December 2012
The A-10 Warthog is the only aircraft specifically designed to support ground troops in combat
Scores of combat veterans ascribe their survival in firefights to intervention by one or more A-10s
Reminiscing about his service in the Korean War, a veteran once remarked to me with wonder how his Army boots were so inadequate in the freezing conditions of winter combat that he and his comrades would compete for the fur-lined boots of dead Chinese soldiers and even mount dangerous trench raids for that purpose. “How was it,” he said, “that I, as a soldier of the richest nation on Earth, was having to steal the boots of soldiers from one of the poorest countries on Earth?”
The campaign against the A-10 has been ongoing for decades but has taken on new urgency as the Air Force defends its treasured F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.
The answer was not that the U.S. military was too underfunded to buy proper boots for its men. After all, the military budget shot up to World War II levels once the war started. It was because senior commanders preferred to spend the money elsewhere, mostly on a variety of strategic nuclear bombers and other aircraft that never reached Korea.
U.S. military footwear has improved since those days, but the overall mind-set has not changed, as glaringly demonstrated by the Air Force's current efforts to junk the A-10 Warthog, the only aircraft specifically designed to support ground troops in combat. The plane is devastatingly effective in this role, thanks to its ability to maneuver close to the ground in the face of hostile fire while accurately targeting enemy positions with its lethal 30-millimeter cannon. Scores of combat veterans ascribe their survival in firefights to intervention by one or more A-10s, accolades accorded no other combat plane.
This simple fact of life cuts no ice with Air Force planners, traditionally disdainful of the close support mission, as they pursue a furious campaign to discard the A-10. They justify their plan with excuses, including that the plane is “40 years old and designed to fight Soviet tanks” and therefore obsolete. But they studiously ignore its vital contributions in every war since 1991.
Lacking experience in, or at least uncaring of, current combat realities, commanders tout multi-role substitutes, such as the B-1 bomber, which depend on video screens and map coordinates to place their bombs. Reliance on such means has left a trail of collateral damage across recent war zones, not only dead civilians by the score, but also U.S. service personnel. In June, a B-1 killed five American soldiers because the crew did not know that the plane's technology could not detect markers for “friendlies.”
The campaign against the A-10 has been ongoing for decades but has taken on new urgency as the Air Force defends its treasured F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. This gold-plated clunker, years late and staggeringly over budget, is today's equivalent of the Korean War-era nuclear bombers that ate up all the boot money. Although the program is years behind schedule because of its shortcomings, the Air Force shamelessly claims that the principal obstacle to imminent deployment is a suddenly discovered shortage of mechanics that can be alleviated only by reassigning personnel from a junked A-10 program.
“Are we going to delay the Joint Strike Fighter?” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said recently. “That would be awful. Are we going to underman the very aircraft that are most needed in this latest fight” against Islamic State?
The delay of which secretary James complained in this fatuous statement (the F-35 will not even complete operational testing until 2019) has been brought about by congress.  Impelled by well-informed arguments from combat veterans and the clear political logic of sticking up for the grunts on the ground, the House Armed Services Committee, as well as the full House and relevant Senate defense committees, voted overwhelmingly this year to prevent the Air Force from retiring the plane.
That should have been the end of it, but the service chiefs refuse to concede defeat. The Senate and House committee bills expressed the same intent but in different ways. The final 2015 defense authorization bill is therefore being negotiated behind closed doors by the committees' leadership. It is here, secluded from public scrutiny, that the will of the wider Congress and the lives of soldiers may be ignored in favor of obliging the generals' demands. The respective Armed Services Committee chairmen, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), have shown little interest in the case for the A-10. Rumors on Capitol Hill do not bode a good result.
Let us hope that common sense and simple humanity win the day.
Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor of Harper's magazine, is the author of the forthcoming "Kill Chain: Drones and the Rise of the High-Tech Assassins."
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11 November 2013

Should the AF Retire the A-10? - A Seminar on a Seminal Question


[Reprinted in Small Wars Journal, 13 November 2013]

The Air Force has decided to retire the A-10 attack aircraft from its inventory.  To people who follow defense, particularly old timers, this cynical move is hardly surprising.  

The purpose of the posting is to announce a seminar in Washington D.C. where experts will address some of the issues raised by this controversial decision.  The seminar is sponsored by the Strauss Military Reform Project will take place at 0930 on November 22 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  It will be open to the public and interested readers can find the RSVP details and the agenda at this link.  Readers are cordially invited to attend a public (and free) seminar discussing some of the issues raised by this decision.  A listing with links to relevant background reading material can be found here. 

The remainder of this posting is intended to give you a little background, written admittedly from my perspective of being a long-time supporter of the A-10, dating back to my involvement as an Air Force officer in vulnerability studies and (peripherally) in some gunfire testing in the late 1960s and later as a civilian in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The A-10 is arguably the most effective combat airplane ever designed to provide close support to ground troops in combat.  This is a very demanding mission, because it is usually necessary when the troops are in trouble.  Pilots have to develop a feel for the battlefield and need to think like infantrymen.  The A-10 pilots are trained specifically for this mission, and work with ground forces in training exercises.  The A-10's staying power over a battlefield (i.e., long loitering capability) gives it a level of responsiveness that high speed jets like the F-15 can not equal.  Moreover, its excellent low speed maneuverability, its highly effective 30mm cannon, and its low vulnerability to enemy fire make it the most responsive and capable CAS weapon in our air inventory.  It is no secret that ground troops in the dusty of battlefields of Afghanistan love the A-10.  

Nevertheless, the AF hates the A-10 with passions rooted deeply in its founding culture of precision strategic bombardment.  

The history of this hatred goes back to the doctrinal debates in the Army Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s, the so-called precision bombardment of Germany and Japan, and the evangelism surrounding the AF's fight for institutional independence that ended with the AF's successful secession for the Army in 1947.  If you doubt the AF's evangelism surrounding the claim of the independent war winning capabilities of strategic bombing, watch and listen carefully to the dialogues in the movies "12 O'Clock High" or "Command Decision." (available on Netflix)

Fundamentally, the AF's animosity toward the A-10 is rooted in the fact that the A-10 works for the Army, and the A-10 subordinates its operational art to that of the Army ground forces it supports.  This combined-arms outlook stands in sharp contrast to the Air Force's view of itself.  Since well before WWII, the AF has promoted its organizational independence from the Army by claiming it could provide a unique independent war winning capability -- precision strategic bombing and destruction of what it deems to be the vital organs of its adversary's supporting economic and political infrastructure -- for example, ball bearing production by Germany during World War II.  This claim leads to a vision of war that is diametrically opposed to one of being part of a combined-arms team. The AF's old old motto, 'Victory Through Airpower Alone," may have fallen into disuse after its litany of failed promises, not least because its theory of vital nodes has not been proven in real war, but the dream has never been forgotten; and today, it remains deeply rooted in the AF's cultural DNA.

Before rejecting this argument, readers should remember: The A-10 had to be forced upon the AF by the Secretary of Defense in the aftermath of the AF's poor performance in the close air support mission during Vietnam, a war where the AF chose to concentrate the bulk of its efforts on the strategic bombing of North Vietnam -- far more heavily, in fact, that when it bombed Germany.  

Another indicator of the AF's dislike of the A-10 becomes apparent when one considers the historical fact that the A-10 production line was the only AF fighter/attack airplane production line that was shut down at the end of its production run in the early 1980s, during the glory days of the Reagan spending spree.  This was a period when everything got funding extensions.  The higher cost F-15 and F-16 production lines, in contrast, were kept open, and the AF bought far more than these fighters than originally planned in the 1970s.  

Also, remember how tens of billions were spent during those glory days restarting the flawed B-1's production, producing only 21 super expensive B-2s -- both strategic bombers, and even restarting the troubled C-5, arguably one of the biggest cost overrunners in DoD's history.  

Moreover, despite the unconstrained programmatic hijinks in the 1980s, routine efforts to replace the A-10 in the mid-to-late 1980s with a more modern version of itself (i.e., a low-cost dedicated CAS platform) were sabotaged by the AF after the initial work was approved by the Secretary of Defense.  

Finally, consider the fact that while the AF now says it must trash the A-10 for what it says are budgetary reasons, it also is lobbying hard to start a $50 billion next-generation strategic bomber program that will suck money out of the taxpayer for the next 50 to 75 years.

Despite the AF's long-term opposition to the A-10, it should be remembered that the A-10 has been a stunning -- some might say embarrassing -- success in every war in which it has been employed, beginning with the First Gulf War in 1991 -- a war, it should be remembered, where the AF reluctantly deployed the A-10 only after the theater commander, an Army general, insisted on it being deployed.  And in today's wars, Marines and Army grunts in Afghanistan will tell you, as they have told me, they love the A-10.

Yet, despite this success story, the AF now claims it is being forced to retire the A-10 as cost saving measure, while at the same time, it is cobbling together a plan to spend $500 billion on a new bomber.  This crazy situation is made even more bizarre by the fact that retiring the A-10 won't even save much money, because it has, by far, the lowest operating costs per flying hour of any fighter/attack aircraft in the AF inventory.   

The current 'plan' for its close support mission in the future -- really a ludicrous rationalization -- is that the AF will replace the low-cost A-10's low-cost, proven capability to support ground troops with the high-cost, highly problematic, multi-mission capabilities of  F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.  

The F-35, as just about everyone knows, is a  deeply troubled, super-high-cost stealth fighter that is way behind schedule.  The F-35, predictably, is plagued with a host of technical problems.  If the F-35 ever becomes operational, it  will be completely unfit for the kind of knife fighting the A-10 excels at -- low and slow jinking around a battlefield saturated with small arms threats.  The F-35 will be far too vulnerable to these cheap threats (including light machine guns).  The F-35's poor thrust-to-weight and high wing loading guarantee poor agility at low speeds and long re-attack times; it will have nothing comparable in offensive capability to the A-10's 30mm gun; its low fuel fraction guarantees the F-35 will have no loitering capability.  Any battle damage the F-35 somehow manages to survive will be almost impossible to repair at the field level without depot-level contractor support, because of its high complexity systems and exotic stealth structures.  Moreover, the F-35's high cost and complexity will guarantee much reduced inventories, poor availability, and low sortie rates coupled with very high operational costs.  

Readers who are interested in learning more about these issues and live near Washington DC are invited to a seminar discussing them.  Participants will address questions surrounding (1) the vital importance of the Close Air Support mission, (2) the controversial decision to retire the A-10 in favor of the F-35, (3) what it will take to provide a CAS capability in the future, and most importantly, (4) how the Defense Department should proceed to insure our ground troops will be given the support they need and deserve.  

The seminar will take the form of a discussion among people having long experience in this mission area -- from a variety perspectives -- from aircraft designers, to pilots with A-10 combat experience and, most importantly, the views soldiers and marines on the receiving end of close support in ground combat operations.  In the interests of having a vigorous debate, pushbacks by people supporting the AF decision will be not only welcomed but emphatically encouraged and solicited.  The goal is to promote a free market of ideas. 

This seminar will take place on 0930 Nov. 22  at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and will be sponsored by the Strauss Military Reform Project, a subsidiary of the Project on Government Oversight.  The details of the seminar and a list of relevant reading materials can be found at the links at the top of this posting. 
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