A long time ago, back when I was young and impressionable and thought it would be a really neat idea, I drove airplanes in the Navy for a living. If you couldn't tell from the photo associated with the profile, I still have a soft spot in what's left of my heart for my old office. But the Turkey is long behind me, and my illustrious military career was neither that illustrious or even particularly long, since it seems that even God enjoys a practical joke every now and then. But don't ask, don't tell - I generally don't and won't talk about my service (no, no, I was mustered out because of medical reasons, so stop wondering), and in any event that's not what I'm blabbing about right now in any event. What I am here to say, simply, is this:
Dick Cheney is the Antichrist.
Okay, stop. This isn't political. I don't give a damn about Halliburton or no-bid "reconstruction" contracts. But I do care about the men and women in uniform, and whether or not they have the tools they need to accomplish their missions. And yes, all you Hornet drivers out there, I'm about to piss you off.
Now, the F/A-18 is a wonderful aircraft - at what it was designed to be, which was a replacement for the A-7 Corsair and as a complimentary air-defence fighter to the F-14 Tomcat. Even so, the aircraft was handicapped from its inception. Due to a design error, the original production models of the Hornet lacked sufficient range, coming up well short of the A-6 Intruder, which at the time the F/A-18 was introduced was the Navy's medium-range attack platform, and of the F-14. The Hornet also carried a smaller payload than the Intruder did. Less gas and less bombs does not necessarily a winning combination make. Nor does the trade-off of the Hornet being able to switch roles from attack platform to air-defence platform simply by jettisoning its bomb load, despite the official line to the contrary, constitute a saving grace. Less range means the bird farm - that would be the carrier - has to get closer to the target, thus increasing the risk to what's probably the only friendly "airfield" in the area. Fewer bombs hung on the bird means that either more aircraft have to be assigned to each strike, or more sorties must be flown against each individual target, thus increasing the risk to the aircrews involved. Being able to jettison your ordnance prior to striking the target in order to "switch roles" simply means that the target goes unserviced, and you have to fly the strike again - and now the bad guys really know you're coming.
Enter Dick Cheney, when he was Secretary of Defence. Yes, the A-6E Intruder was an "old" airframe by the time the '90s rolled around. After all, the original airframe had been designed and then built in the 1960s. But age isn't necessarily a limiting factor; after all, the B-52 arose out of a design requirement established in the late 1940s, was built beginning in the early 1950s, and is still chugging along today and for the foreseeable future. Despite having new toys like the B-1B and the B-2, the Air Force plans on keeping the B-52 in front-line service for several more decades. Why? Because it is a big aircraft, and partly due to that size, it can be easily upgraded to operate in the current threat environments.
As such aircraft go, the A-6E was a big airplane, too. While by the early '90s the official plan was to replace the Intruder with the ill-conceived and ill-fated A-12, there was also an option to upgrade the aircraft to the A-6F configuration. Put simply, same airframe, same ordnance load-out, entirely new aircraft on the inside. The A-6F variant would have given the Intruder at least another twenty years worth of productive life, at a far cheaper cost than having the contractors cough up an entirely new design; more importantly, it would have allowed time for a new design-generation to be completed.
Instead, Mr. Cheney rightfully killed the A-12 programme. Problem is, he then went on to kill the A-6F, too. What we got then was the F/A-18 being shoe-horned into the vacuum left by the departure of the Intruder . . . even though the Intruder was a more-capable platform in the medium-attack role. The reasons offered for killing the Intruder upgrade and replacing it with the Hornet, on the surface, seem simple enough: costs. The F/A-18 was a newer aircraft, with a longer potential service-life, incorporated in its design newer technology, and was cheaper to maintain.
Dollars over lives, in other words. Yes, the Hornet may have been cheaper to maintain, but it was still hobbled by a lack of range and a lack of payload. Not so bad, really, if you have to do something like fly from the Persian Gulf to Kuwait or Iraq or Iran, but it really sucks if you have to, say, fly from the Arabian Sea to Afghanistan. The latter can't be done in a Hornet without either having a divert field somewhere along the way, or tanking a few more times than you would have to in an A-6 or an F-14, but, hey, so what, right? You don't have to spend as much time and TLC on a newer airplane, so we'll save a few bucks . . . that we can then throw down the sinkhole known as the F/A-22 Raptor, along with a lot of other good money.
A funny thing happened to the design of the F/A-18 about the time that Mr. Cheney decided it was the wave of the future for Naval Aviation. A requirement was issued to upgrade the airframe. Imagine that. All of a sudden, DoD wanted a Hornet that could actually do the things they needed it to do at the ranges and with the payloads necessary. So the concept of the "Super Hornet" was born - a bigger airframe, with more gas and able to carry more bombs.
Except that even the F/A-18E Super Hornet still comes up short in range and payload when compared to the old Intruder and to the F-14. Oops. Someone's still asleep at the switch, it seems.
In September of 2006, the last F-14 squadron was disestablished by the Navy, finally turning over both attack and fleet air-defence entirely to the Hornet community. Now, right up until its demise, the Tomcat was widely acknowledged by aviation experts to be one of the premiere fighter aircraft in the world, particularly in its F-14D configuration, which solved a lot of niggling little problems (such as the under-powered engines). Even better, the Navy had rediscovered the fact that the Tomcat had been designed with an attack capability. Yes, Dickie, they could hang bombs on it and it could actually deliver them on-target, hence the new nickname of "Bombcat." Oh, yeah, and the F-14 was one of the few tactical jets the Navy had that could fly from the Arabian Sea to Afghanistan with a minimum of tanking.
Now, how does Mr. Cheney fit into this part of it? Well, back when he was Secretary of Defence, he decided that it would be a good idea to kill the F-14 programme, too. Not just kill it, but drive a stake through it's heart and cut it's head off, just to make sure it never rose from the grave to threaten him again. He killed the on-going programme to reconfigure all of the F-14A and F-14A+ models to the F-14D standard, and then he killed all production of the Tomcat.
Why? Because the F/A-18, he said, could do the job just as well, despite the fact that it had less range. Because the F/A-18 was a newer platform and . . . it was cheaper to maintain.
Well, again, not entirely unreasonable, I suppose . . . though the technology embodied in the F-14D was of the same generation as that in the F/A-18. Oh, and except for the fact that there was a plan to provide a "Super Tomcat" version that would have kept the F-14 on the cutting edge until the 2030s or so . . .
Which Mr. Cheney also had a hand in killing, as the Vice President.
And that is why Dick Cheney is the Antichrist. I have no problem with wanting to save money in the defence budget, or in any other part of the Federal budget. God knows, there's plenty to be saved. I do, however, have a problem doing that by jamming platforms into roles they weren't meant to fill. I do have a problem with doing that by slighting the men and women we expect to do the heavy lifting when push comes to shove. If it comes down to a choice between dollars and lives, I'm going to go with the lives, every time.
So maybe it's a good thing I don't work for the government . . .
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