{"id":192226,"date":"2009-04-26T23:06:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T04:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/26\/usaf-sees-writing-on-the-wall\/"},"modified":"2009-04-26T23:06:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-27T04:06:00","slug":"usaf-sees-writing-on-the-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/04\/26\/usaf-sees-writing-on-the-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"USAF Sees Writing on the Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

My guess is that a replacement for the A-10 would be, considering advances in armor, propulsion, and cannon, would be at less than \u00be of the weight.<\/p>\n

The problem would be how to deal with mission\/feature creep.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object>
Video courtesy of the DEW Line<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1007,1008,1027],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aviation","category-defense-procurement","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}