Forum: Air Power

Salute!

I am tired of all the whiz-bang ideas and such, plus folks enamored with a certain airframe.

So what's the REQUIREMENT?

I propose:

- There is an operational requirement to meet the current and future threats that requires the capability to to hit small, mobile and vague targets, be they people, supply points, vehicles, bunkers, etc. Some may be in close proximity to "friendly" folks.

- The operational environment will be middle or low-threat. So no radar-guided SAM's or ack. IR missiles like Stinger should be assumed. Ack of the 20/23mm caliber assumed, but manually aimed. No ZSU-23-4 radar directed variety.

- An aircraft that can be used for the mission must have good loiter time, ability to operate from unimproved runways and austere environments, and be able to carry and employ weapons across the spectrum. No dependence upon all "smart" bombs and hi-tech datalinks to HHQ, etc. like in Star Wars, "go manual" if the situation requires.

- Tough, battle-damage resistant airframe.

- Loiter time is important. No get in, get out missions for the most part. Pilots should be prepared for hours of boredom separated by seconds of stark terror.

- Great visibility from the cockpit. No fancy sensor suite, but basic eyeballs and radio calls to acquire targets. Some new stuff could help, but in the end we have to acquire and destroy targets in an austere electronic environment.

- Easy maintenance for the airframe and motors and electronics is essential. We can't wait a week for a new computer board or connector.

- A great computed bomb/rocket/missile system. No great dependence upon GPS except for basic navigation funstions. Pure inertial with GPS help when it is available, but pure inertial when the satellites go awry. The Viper, Sluf and such have this already. The new stuff allows a point-and-shoot capability with no dependence upon the satellite data. Pure inertiall guidance for smart bombs. Go look up the AMRAAM strapdown chip and tell me if it won't get the bomb within 2 or 3 meters when the time-of-flight is less than 10 or 15 seconds. Point at tgt, designate, launch the bomb and BAM!

So that's my starting point.

Gums sends ....

P.S. Snake! Jump in here, PLZ.

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Quote:

No fancy sensor suite, but basic eyeballs and radio calls to acquire targets.

So you're going to operate at night under flares?

Shocked

OL

Salute!

Good point Outlaw.

About 20 years ago the Warthogs used their Maverick sensor to find tank barrels that were glowing. Guy told me they looked like toothpicks.

LANTIRN is neat, so maybe we need to have LLTV and/or IR to help, but if that stuff goes tits up, flares and eyeballs still work.

I never liked the flares except for CAS. Over the Trail they just helped the gomers to get an eyeball on us and hose away.

My main point is that we can have very cheap sensors and nav/bomb systems adapted from older jets to satisfy the mission requirements.

I got in a lotta trouble back in 1974 for suggesting that the Warthog could use all the fancy stuff from the A-7D minus the Doppler-assisted nav system and the radar altimeter and even the projected map display. Cost would have been about $250,000 then for an airframe selling for $3 or $4 million with ZERO smart stuff, crappy HUD, no inertial, no computed bomb delivery, no autopilot, no nothing except a super gun.

As much as I want to keep things low-tech, we've progressed. The original Warthog TISL and Pave Penny pod allowed the pilot to acquire a tgt that the grunts illuminated with a laser. This was 1972 or so.

The A-7D computed delivery/nav system was really cheap at the time, and we had the ease of integrating sensors for altitude and inertial velocities and such without dedicated boxes like the Navy had with HARM, HARPOON, etc. You could point and shoot in seconds with a good chance of hitting the tgt. The Aardvark and Tomcat were much different, and I worked for 14 years integrating new weapons for those planes. Same for the Hornet and B-52, B-1 and even the B-2.

So I propose the COIN plane have a computer-assisted bomb/gun/rocket system that does not depend upon GPS or outside tgt info. If we have that, then super, but we can still be autonomous if the good guys tell us where they are and where the enema is. At night it's usually obvious from all the tracers and such.

One of my required operational capabilities was freedom from expensive and time-consuming replacement of parts/computers/sensors. The human eyeball still works when all the electrons fade into the ether.

When I did the interface for the MMW-seeker for the Maverick I had a point-and-shoot mode. Pilot sees a tank or convoy, turns to put the doofer on the tgt and pull the trigger. Sucker would look straight ahead and lock on to the tank or truck or...... and guide, hit, destroy. Like a 'winder.

We don't need the F-35 sensor suite or whatever else it has. We don't need a cosmic A2A radar 'cause we ain't taking Slammers with us ( maybe a 'winder or two).

We could prolly take an iPhone or cheapass laptop and have all the computer capability we need.

Gums sends.....

Do those 70mm laser designated rockets excite you at all? Seems like you would want to offer some kind of cost-effective, precision round.

Quote:

At night it's usually obvious from all the tracers and such.

Salute!

First, to 'rat.

Any weapon that depends upon someone else or outside source of data is not gonna work out real well in austere environments. Good thing about dumb bombs is they cannot be jammed, they don't need cosmic internal avionics ( the jet has all that), and no propulsion system, pneumatics/hydraulic control systems, etc.

Our current computer-assisted systems can get the dumb bombs within 5 or 10 meters. They can be aimed within a few seconds and released a few seconds after that. You can't do that with the JDAM or LGB or .... Oh yeah, then there's the gun.

I flew a no sierra manual weapon system for over 300 combat missions, then another 2 years. I then moved to the first digitally-integrated system in the world. We didn't have the 1553 data buss yet, but it wasn't hard to integrate new avionics. Tomcat and Aardvark and Phantom much harder. Go see my posts about the Sluf.

SNAKE!!!!!! Jump in here, man!

To Ford.....

Many of the good guy camps/outposts had "arrows" they could turn to point at the bad guys. Used cans of oil or whatever. So it was very obvious who was who. About the time I flew my last combat mission in 1973 the good guys had transponders we could see on our radar and would tell us the tgt was "x" degrees and "x" meters away. The 'varks used this, but they didn't trust our Sluf, tho' we could do it.

In the day the tracers were not real easy to see. looked like you were flying thru a flock of birds. At night it was real scary, but your wingie could roll in and have a great aimpoint, heh heh.

The bigger acks like 23mm, 37 and 57 and 85 had neat airbursts after their time-of-flight fuze expired. Was still hard to see their tracers in daylight, but at night it looked like golf balls, footballs or basketballs zooming up.

I liked night better than day, as it was harder for the gomers to see me than it was for me to see where they were firing from.

later,

Gums sends....

P.S. Having worked armament integration for about 14 years after I got out, I realized that we could "point and shoot" easily to tell the weapon where to go. Figure 20 milliseconds or less. With the AMRAAM strapdown our "intelligent" bomb could prolly hit within 5 meters with no outside help, zero start-up time, no GPS, no ground laser designator, etc. The really stoopid eggs could prolly hit within 10 or 15 meters using the jet's computer system. The wind-corrected dispenser could hit within 40 or 50 meters after 30 seconds without any GPS updates - from 30,000 friggin' feet ( circa 1995 or so). So my feeling is to have a smart plane and dumb munitions. And then, you can "feel the force" and go manual when R2D2 takes a hit!!

Gums - I'd say that's a pertty fair future CAS/COIN requirement and platform/weap specs proposal. Only note that all the fanboys (I'm guilty on that) on the previous thread were mainly deriving their respective views based on the supposed USAF LAAR plan.

Yours however would seem to be a pretty common sense and straight forward alternative solution though. Many would agree with you also on concerns over the apparently increasing future dependency on things such as GPS and sat links, etc. Given that, the comp assisted computer targeting seems pretty logical as a part of such a future CAS/COIN mod, although if it could have the adv data bus as well for the whiz bang guidance/sensing bolt-on capability, then would that seem to be a bonus, albeit not completely necessary to fulfill requirements? Respects..

One suspects the specs already exist- too bad the test program, Imminent Fury, is classified. In the fact the Super Tucano was flown with a very sophisticated sensor suite. Besides CAS the aircraft was required for ISR, comm relay, and generally supporting the ground forces.

Salute!

What Geo said.....

One nice thing about having a "modern" avionics architecture is the "plug and play" capability inherent using the data busses and a common weapon/system interface (Mil-Std-1760 and STANAG xxxxx).

This was my idea back in 1974 when I got reprimanded for publishing a letter to the editor in AvWeek.

Make no mistake. In a high-threat scenario I like, really like, the JDAMs', stand-off weapons, etc. But for those we PLAN AHEAD OF TIME!!!! The COIN/CAS mission ain't that way.

I am opposed to a small, cheap airframe that can only take one hit from a 23mm or 37mm AAA round.

I am opposed to a $35 million jet that requires all kindsa fancy maintenance equipment and such.

If we have to "go heavy", then the Tucano and other "lites" won't hack it.

So you can all guess what my platform of choice is.

Gums sends...

Would that be an [cough]A-10[/cough]?

I know this is navy, but how as the A-6 in the operational role in Vietnam? Commander Nichols in his book On Yankee Station, talked of a mission where 2 A-6 Intruders put 26 bombs inside the fence of a power plant at night. The NVA were convinced the damage was done by a B-52.

Forum: Air Power

COIN operational requirements