Johnnyreb wrote:If I recall right, back under Bill Clinton the Air Force was going to retire the A-10. And the A-10 pilots responded by formally requesting, en masse, that they be transferred with aircraft to the Army. Soon after, the Air Force dropped the matter and kept them.
I highly doubt it. Being the driver of a retired vehicle leaves one with very little influence. The Air Force would likely have said "that's cute, now drop off the birds at D-M and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out." There's also the issue of literally all the A-10 maintenance personnel being 1990s airmen in this scenario, back when superior AF standard of living was both a Thing and a matter of pride. Stationary bike PT tests and all that.
There are other versions of the story (like the Army itself or the Marines saying "we'll take 'em!" and the Air Force spitefully keeping them because "Mine! Not yours!") and they all generally come from guys who heard from a guy who heard from a guy, and so on.
But if things did work this way, where branches get to pull stunts like that, we're talking about a time when the Army was still trying to make the Comanche happen and ironing out bugs in the rest of its aviation component. They'd probably not really want to take on a whole additional budgetary and logistical headache with an aircraft whose manufacturer had just gone out of business. Which is more or less what they wound up saying
last year.
Ever since the Key West Agreement of 1948, the Air Force has constantly looked for ways to not provide specialized ground support aircraft to support the Army. They've always placed that job last and the sexy fighter jets and big bombers first. The A-10 and the Skyraider are I think the only such planes the Air Force used since WWII that were designed for ground support instead of air combat or bombing. And I bet there were damn few generals in the Air Force who came up flying them. Much like the F-16 pilots a few years back complained about the Air Force treating them like 2nd class citizens at promotion time. I don't know why the army ever bothered to abide by the agreement, since the Air Force almost immediately started failing to hold up their end.
Neither the A-10 nor the Skyraider were conceived as specialized CAS aircraft. The A-10 was supposed to slow down Ivan's tanks in the Fulda Gap and the Skyraider was a torpedo bomber. Fortunately, they proved capable of doing more than that.
The Air Force bought actually quite a few aircraft specifically for CAS. The A-37 Dragonfly, the gunships (AC-47, AC-117, AC-130), and the OV-10 to name a few, not to mention all the other kinds of aircraft that were pressed into the role with varying degrees of success. This sort of thing is why I tend to throw out "[Citation Needed]" every time people start talking about the Air Force failing to hold up its commitments where CAS is concerned.
I haven't heard anything about F-16 pilots being treated as second-class citizens. That sort of griping was generally from the F-15C and F-22 side of things, where being in a specialized air superiority fighter means you have pretty much zero chance of racking up combat hours and actions in a COIN campaign, where all the work is being put in by F-15Es, F-16s and A-10s. It's hard to put together an impressive OPR with bullets like "didn't accidentally go
supersonic over Norwich."
And I don't know why we can buy a few hundred Super Tucanos from Argentina and give them to the Afghans and Iraqis but won't just buy a few hundred of them for our own use. You can buy a whole squadron of those for use against Jihadis for what we spend on one single super high tech jet designed for air superiority, not ground support. And then the Air Force might not be short 600 pilots and the airlines might not be giving up on the Air Force as a primary source for airline pilots.
Because TANSTAAFL, or "it's not economical to go to bed early to save money on candles if the result is twins." A few hundred Super Tucanos means a few thousand support personnel and a new supply chain at a time when the Air Force has been making huge cuts to manning, all for an aircraft that can really only do one kind of mission. A mission that's generally been handled thus far by the F-15E better than any other platform.
CAS is just one of the Air Force's many responsibilities, one it really hasn't had much of an issue meeting at all for the last few decades. It doesn't really have any extra money to throw at it when it still needs to fund and maintain its others as well. This is why it generally makes sense to invest in more expensive multi-role aircraft: it may cost more to use an F-16 for CAS than a Super Tucano, but the F-16 won't be sidelined if the conflict changes to one that requires more than just blowing up idiots with AKs. For example, if something like Syria were to boil up.
If the Air force doesn't want propeller aircraft for ground support, I'd bet the Army sure as hell does. But then the Air Force, as I said, has never really lived up to its ground support responsibility, but fights tooth and nail to make sure the Army can't do that either. The army got the armed helicopter only after winning major battles against the Air Force, who claimed they owned that, but at the time were not nothing anything to make it happen to meet the army's needs.
Do you have any names, dates, acts of government etc I could use to look any of this up? Because I've been seeing a lot of this "Air Force hates CAS, won't do its job, stops just short of recreationally nuking Army posts every holiday weekend" business for years, and given the actual wartime actions of the branch, it just doesn't seem to bear any of it out. The closest I can find is actually a dispute over the use of cargo aircraft in post-Key West policy agreements like the Pace-Finletter MOU and the Johnson-McConnell Agreement. Helicopters are an afterthought, and it seems most of the resistance to the Army arming helicopters was actually
internal to the Army.
There's quite a difference between the Army being dissatisfied with the support it was getting, and with the Air Force simply not providing any. Especially in a time of rapidly developing military technology and learning of its capabilities and limitations. The Johnson-McConnell Agreement in 1966 was at a time when the Air Force had already been deploying specialized CAS aircraft to Vietnam. The Air Force was doing its job, but the Army wanted more. That's not unreasonable or terribly surprising given the nature of the conflict.
We're not exactly talking about the IJA and the IJN, here.
