Most of us have our own light-attack aircraft requirement origin story, mine goes back a bit.
While some rando USMC 1-star named Mattis was walking around C5F HQ trying to figure out what was going on from Kandarhar to Kabul, a bunch of standard issue LT and LCDR were sitting around making jokes about the MOPP gear they were issued when the conversation came to what we would need in this strange war that was thrown in our faces a few weeks earlier.
Someone at that table set a bug in my ear that I’ve watched get passed around for the next 17-yrs; for the type of battles we will be fighting against this brand of insurgents – it sure would be nice if we had what previous generations had from WWII through Vietnam … readily available, long dwell, close support aircraft. The A-10 is nice, but a bit too much. FW is nice, but short legged and a bit fragile.
And so, for the next 17-yrs that need morphed in to a requirement and once the USAF got hold if it … well … here we are.
An actual aircraft that we are still picking at already has a proven combat record in Colombia and Brazil. We’ve even dusted off some OV-10 Broncos to prove, again, how great they are … but no.
Over at my homeblog a few years ago, I coined a measurement of time. I call it a worldwar.
That is 07DEC41 to 02SEP45. 3-years, 8-months, 26 days. Including the end date, that is 1,366 days.
Bounce that off this timeline via Valerie Insinna at DefenseNews to get an existing platform to, literally, support troops in contact;
The service intended to put out a final request for proposals this month for a potential light-attack aircraft program, but the date has now slipped into 2019, an Air Force official confirmed Tuesday.
“The Air Force does not anticipate release of the final Light Attack Request for Proposal by the end of the calendar year as we complete additional analysis,” Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Hope Cronin said in an emailed response to Defense News.
…
…Air Force acquisition officials have shied away from declaring whether a program of record will begin in the fiscal 2020 budget, but the August presolicitation seems to limit the contenders to the A-29 and AT-6, stating that SNC and Textron “are the only firms that appear to possess the capability necessary to meet the requirement within the Air Force’s time frame without causing an unacceptable delay in meeting the needs of the warfighter.”
The end of FY2020 will be almost exactly 19 years since that conversation I had in Bahrain. Let’s be kind and say the “requirement” didn’t really break through the Pentagon miasma until the Iraq experience was in fully fetid flower four years later in 2006.
That is 15 solid years. There are 5,475 days in 15 years. That is a bit over 4 worldwars.
We are taking 4 worldwars to do nothing but analyze what everyone knows is needed.
Yes, we in the Navy have our own challenges, but what the USAF is doing with light-attack is the perfect example of a larger problem.
Why do we accept this?
Time to repeat what I’ve been saying for years. Our DOD is a terminally sick creature, infected by a pathogen of its own creation. The process and the bureaucracy do not serve the national defense, the national defense serves the process and the bureaucracy.
Like an unmaintained hulk wallowing pierside; each year more and more accretions are added to the hulk, weighing it down, freezing up any moving object. Each year of neglect makes the cost and time to repair greater … and no one with a lever on power cares. Each passing year it appears that it will take a sinking or a slow settling in to the muck to drive to action.
People become numb by inaction, or deluded to thinking that such a condition is normal … and pray for the PCS cycle to carry them elsewhere before someone looks over at the hulk and mistakes it for a warship and orders it in to battle on their watch.
Winter is coming and yet we are still issuing tropical kit.
