27 April 2009

USAF Sees Writing on the Wall

The US Air Force Chief of staff, General Norton Schwartz, is now saying that maybe, just maybe, the service should look at procuring a "light strike" capability.

The current aircraft operate too far from the front, and do not have the endurance to stay on station a meaningful length of time.

He was talking about something like the an armed turboprop trainer, though the basic needs are very similar to the A-10, and there are a lot of those in the boneyard.

I would also argue that a turbofan based new airframe, designed to roughly the same specs as the A-10 would be superior, because you could incorporate narrow band stealth to address the issue of the radar guided AAA.

My guess is that a replacement for the A-10 would be, considering advances in armor, propulsion, and cannon, would be at less than ¾ of the weight.

The problem would be how to deal with mission/feature creep.


Video courtesy of the DEW Line.

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