F-22A in a spot of bother (major report)

[Bluewolf]

OK, dumb question here but I have no idea how it all works but what's stopping the US phasing out its older aircraft? I mean B-52's, though quite good craft are near half a century old. I am not sure or not if the US has a suitable replacement but would getting rid of such craft be a bit of a money saver. I assume most have some sort of matainance and such.

[Omega18]

OK, dumb question here but I have no idea how it all works but what's stopping the US phasing out its older aircraft? I mean B-52's, though quite good craft are near half a century old. I am not sure or not if the US has a suitable replacement but would getting rid of such craft be a bit of a money saver. I assume most have some sort of matainance and such.

In the case of the B-52 and most of the actually oldest aircraft, the issue is there isn't a replacement available yet at the moment. The B-52 can still effectively serve as a basic "bomb truck" which can carry a heavy payload as well as a useful cruise missile launching platform among other things. Its a useful option for the US in areas where they have secured air dominence already. The B-52 can also fly high enough that low altitude SAMs and shoulder mounted anti-aircraft missiles can't hit it, and even if something like an SA-18 does hit it, with the B-52's 8 engines the hit isn't going to bring down the plane. For the moment the issue is its viewed as cheaper to keep the B-52s in service than develope an effective replacement which does the same thing. There also is a practical political reality that maintence for the existing aircraft tends to be an easier sell than spending a bunch of money at once on a new program until the maintence issues really become glaring. (The B-52s do benefit from a bunch of older no longer in service B-52s in the "boneyard" which can sometimes provide spare parts.)

(Tanker aircraft in the KC-135 is another key area where the aircraft are really old, but the current ones can still get used for the moment. The issue is there has been a huge controversy over competition for that program and how its been managed which is holding things up as rebids and the like have occured, the two competitors right now are Airbus and Boeing so some Congressmen are also outright proposing that the US should simply buy American for the program.)

With regards to fighters, the US is progressively retiring some of its oldest ones such as F-15s and F-16s. The idea though is along with the F-22s still to be completed to reach the 187 which is now planned to be the cutoff, the F-35s should be coming along in the future to make up for some of the decrease as the older aircraft get retired.

[Commander 598]

OK, dumb question here but I have no idea how it all works but what's stopping the US phasing out its older aircraft? I mean B-52's, though quite good craft are near half a century old. I am not sure or not if the US has a suitable replacement but would getting rid of such craft be a bit of a money saver. I assume most have some sort of matainance and such.

In the case of the B-52 and most of the actually oldest aircraft, the issue is there isn't a replacement available yet at the moment. The B-52 can still effectively serve as a basic "bomb truck" which can carry a heavy payload as well as a useful cruise missile launching platform among other things. Its a useful option for the US in areas where they have secured air dominence already. The B-52 can also fly high enough that low altitude SAMs and shoulder mounted anti-aircraft missiles can't hit it, and even if something like an SA-18 does hit it, with the B-52's 8 engines the hit isn't going to bring down the plane. For the moment the issue is its viewed as cheaper to keep the B-52s in service than develope an effective replacement which does the same thing. There also is a practical political reality that maintence for the existing aircraft tends to be an easier sell than spending a bunch of money at once on a new program until the maintence issues really become glaring. (The B-52s do benefit from a bunch of older no longer in service B-52s in the "boneyard" which can sometimes provide spare parts.)

If I'm not mistaken, it's pretty cheap to operate as well. At least that's what I've heard.

[Sea Skimmer]

The main reason we can still fly the B-52 and KC-135 today is that most of the ones now in service spent the cold war sitting on SAC alert aprons. That meant lots of high quality maintenance and low flying hours, while only older models like the B-52D (all now scrapped or destroyed) did the work bombing Vietnam. The planes are somewhat cheap to fly, but new engines on the B-52 would have greatly reduced costs (the study saying they wouldn’t was shown to be totally flawed within two years) as well as doubling the aircrafts unrefueled range. That’d mean less tanker support needed and less money spend on that in turn.

[Alyeska]

The main reason we can still fly the B-52 and KC-135 today is that most of the ones now in service spent the cold war sitting on SAC alert aprons. That meant lots of high quality maintenance and low flying hours, while only older models like the B-52D (all now scrapped or destroyed) did the work bombing Vietnam. The planes are somewhat cheap to fly, but new engines on the B-52 would have greatly reduced costs (the study saying they wouldn’t was shown to be totally flawed within two years) as well as doubling the aircrafts unrefueled range. That’d mean less tanker support needed and less money spend on that in turn.

Using the old B52s as spare parts to keep the new ones flying didn't hurt either.

[Sea Skimmer]

Stripping spare parts off old planes saves money, doesn’t really change the basic sustainability of the aircraft particularly given the many systems differences between the B-52 models.

[MKSheppard]

The reason why so many people are opposed to cutting the military's size as part of a total reform package to reduce our committments overseas is because you just know that the goddamn democrats and milquetoast northeastern republicans would begin and end their program with:

"Cut Military Size"

And not get to the second part of the reforms; which would consist of :

"Use money saved from reducing force size to modernize force and make it ten times lethal"

Some examples:

With reorganization of the Army from 10 divisions (2 Armored, 2 Mechanized, 2 Light Infantry, 1 Air Assault, 1 Airborne) to 8 (4 Armored, 4 Infantry) we can now afford to do a comprehensive refit of the entire Army, such as funding a hell of a lot of improvement programs, like advanced turbines for Abrams, to reduce fuel consumption; bringing back Crusader Howitzer from the dead as part of a comprehensive Army Artillery Modernization; for example; we could reduce the number of SP Howitzers in the US Army by about 65% and get away with it because Crusader shoots twice as far, and is many times more lethal.

Eliminating the Light Infantry, Airborne and Air Assault divisions (we'll still retain the capabilities, but at brigade scale instead of division scale), means the US Army changes from being a force that can be deployed fast to hotspots, to one that slowly deploys, and is designed to fight and win a very high intensity armored war.

One of the reasons behind us having a entire airborne division, was so that a single brigade in it is always ready to airdrop anywhere in the world on 72 hours notice......a very highly realistic scenario. For example, we didn't hit A-stan that fast in 2001; and the place was essentially undefended.

Slicing a Carrier from the Navy would be worth it -- e.g. we retire USS Enterprise and not fund a replacement; IF we can afford to buy 450 F-18E/F Super Hornets, to bring our remaining carrier air wings back up to 80-90 aircraft; from their present level of 40~ aircraft; would mean our capability improves; since we can now toss twice as many aircraft from our carriers as before.

As for the Air Force; if we kill off a significant portion of the F-16 squadrons and replace them with F-22s, we'd be able to shrink the USAF.

For example, there are about 688 PAI F-16s in the USAF as of Sep 2008. That's about 27 Fighter Squadrons.

If we killed them and replaced them on a two for one basis with ~14 x F-22A Squadrons; we'd have a significantly improved air force; and it would only cost us about $19 billion to buy the additional 157 F-22A required.

By contrast, operating 14~ fighter squadrons costs us about $100 million for each squadron; so eliminating the F-16 force would save us $1.4 billion a year; which means that we could pay off the F-22A cost of procurement in about a decade.

The Marine Corps can stand to benefit from a major reorganization.

Eliminate the Third MARDIV; shrink the forces afloat into a smaller number of units; but much more heavily armed than before -- let's be honest, what is a single MAU with 2,200 men; 4 tanks, 7 to 16 LAVs, and 15 Amtracks going to do against any force more organized than Somalis? Sure, it can be deploy in the mythical 48-72 hours; but once it gets there, like the 82nd Airborne, it really can't do anything.

Kill the F-35C VTOL program, and offset that by as part of the 450 F-18 buy, giving many of the F-18s to Marine Fighter-Bomber Squadrons operating from Carriers; which would be more effective in delivering bombloads and CAS in support of amphibious operations than VTOL/STOL F-35Cs.

[Falkenhayn]

I know that simple proportions like 1 Carrier with a Full Air Wing = 2 Carriers with 1/2 Airwings don't quite jive for maitenance reasons among other things. But why do we run our Carriers at almost half capacity?

[Guardsman Bass]

Eliminating the Light Infantry, Airborne and Air Assault divisions (we'll still retain the capabilities, but at brigade scale instead of division scale), means the US Army changes from being a force that can be deployed fast to hotspots, to one that slowly deploys, and is designed to fight and win a very high intensity armored war.

Out of curiosity, if you wanted to make US deployment slower, could you also cut the active duty forces in the Army down low, and replace them with a significant amount of reservists (while keeping a stockpile of equipment)? It would at least seem to create some steeper political consequences for deployment, since you'd be dragging a bunch of people away from their civilian jobs and communities instead of deploying already active soldiers.

[Sea Skimmer]

I know that simple proportions like 1 Carrier with a Full Air Wing = 2 Carriers with 1/2 Airwings don't quite jive for maitenance reasons among other things.

The USN has been doing a lot of reworking on the way it maintains and trains its carrier groups, so that we can surge a large number of them from home ports at any given time. That isn’t quite as good as a hull deployed in a combat zone, but this goes back to the fact that in the 1990s we structure the military for highly unrealistic scenarios which called for very low and unrealistic response times. Losing one hull shouldn’t make any great difference, and frankly it’s almost inevitable that it will happen. Better to have it happen through planning then just see the funding cut at random.

But why do we run our Carriers at almost half capacity?

Because people are stupid and have allowed two decades of failure to fund replacement aircraft to go unchecked. The A-6 and the S-3 died without replacements, that’s 20 fixed wing aircraft per deck gone out of hand, and then we didn’t fund a proper F-14 replacement (F-35 kind of took over the job but its always been known it would be a long way off) and then never bought F/A-18s quickly enough to replace the rate at which we shed A-7s and the last Phantoms. The USN has even gone so far as to internally bullshit its self about this problem by reducing fighter squadrons from 12 to 10 planes. But we already knew the USN has had largely incompetent leadership for years. I'm still waiting for a CVN to run aground in its home port.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Because people are stupid and have allowed two decades of failure to fund replacement aircraft to go unchecked. The A-6 and the S-3 died without replacements, that’s 20 fixed wing aircraft per deck gone out of hand, and then we didn’t fund a proper F-14 replacement (F-35 kind of took over the job but its always been known it would be a long way off) and then never bought F/A-18s quickly enough to replace the rate at which we shed A-7s and the last Phantoms. The USN has even gone so far as to internally bullshit its self about this problem by reducing fighter squadrons from 12 to 10 planes. But we already knew the USN has had largely incompetent leadership for years. I'm still waiting for a CVN to run aground in its home port.

Well, the Kitty Hawk did have a rather illustrious career at the end.