Light attack revisited - Curt Lewis

Back To The Future: Why The U.S. Needs A Light Turboprop Attack Aircraft
GUEST POST WRITTEN BY
Col. Michael Pietrucha
The author is a member of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Studies Group.

A Beechcraft AT-6C Wolverine light attack aircraft releases flares during an operational test Oct. 5, 2010, over the Southern Arizona desert. (U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Dave Neve)

Throwback. Backwards. Illogical. Three words used recently to describe an emerging U.S. Air Force initiative to field light attack aircraft of a type not operated by U.S. forces since Vietnam. Aircraft that are compact, lethal, relatively inexpensive and easy to support in the field. Powered by a turboprop engine, looking remarkably like their forebears from the Second World War, they often inspire an emotional reaction that equates the design features negatively with older concepts, now long past.

To some of the combat aviators who have been deeply embroiled in continuous conflict since 9/11, they're a no-brainer.

This discussion of options for new airplanes is no longer academic. This summer, the Air Force will engage in a light attack experiment at Holloman AFB, which may be followed by a combat demonstration the likes of which has not been carried out by the Air Force since Vietnam.

If you're prepared to take advice from individuals with no aviation background at all, this should worry you deeply. But if you're prepared to concede, maybe, that professional aviators with extensive combat experience haven't suddenly lost their minds, then it should become immediately obvious that there might be some utility in light attack. Certainly it has historical roots - The Navy, Marines and Air Force all used light attack aircraft in Vietnam. But just using the term doesn't adequately describe the aircraft, or the reasons to consider them. Why a light attack aircraft?

Light attack aircraft were just that - smaller attack aircraft like the A-37 Dragonfly or Navy OV-10, with significant weapons loads but not designed to stand up in the front of the apocalyptic Soviet/NATO battlefield. For the Air Force, the long path to considering a new attack aircraft started in 2008. Faced with increasing airpower demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, the existing fighters were being wrung out. For the kind of air support we were providing for U.S. ground forces, the existing F-16, F-15E and Navy / Marine F-18 were a ridiculous overmatch. Recall that by 2008, the Air Force and Naval aviation had been in continuous combat since January 16, 1991, and a decade and a half later the strain was showing. Meeting airpower demand with expensive, high end aircraft was the only option we had, and we were flying their wings off. We still are.


Figure 2: Navy OV-10 Bronco of VAL-4 "Black Ponies", firing a 5-inch Zuni rocket over the Mekong Delta U.S. Navy

First, we had to define the aircraft. At Air Combat Command, a handful of aviators wrote the concept for OA-X, OA meaning observation/attack, and X meaning something we didn't have a number for yet (not meaning experimental, as some have written). We started with historical examples - the aircraft we used to fight an insurgency in the jungles of Vietnam. The first example was the A-1 Skyraider, a hulking behemoth of an airplane with a massive, 18-cylinder radial engine designed as a carrier aircraft and transferred to the Air Force in 1964 after the Navy retired them. Alongside, the OV-10. The OV-10 Bronco, a new-build, twin-turboprop observation aircraft used as a forward air controller by the Air Force and as an attack aircraft by the Navy and Marines. What the authors envisioned with OA-X was a modern turboprop aircraft with advanced sensors and precision weapons just like a modern fast jet. But we also wanted aircraft that could be forward deployed to austere airfields, fueled from 55-gallon drums, and supplied from the back of a pickup truck - none of which a jet can easily do. And we needed it to be relatively cheap to buy and to operate. In short, we envisioned an aircraft that looked like earlier designs, with the weapons and sensors of a modern jet.


Figure 3: An Air Force A-1E Skyraider escorts an HH-3 Jolly Green Giant on a combat search & rescue (CSAR) mission, 1966 U.S. Air Force

These aircraft existed. I had seen the A-29 Super Tucano in Colombia in 2007. Raytheon had a conversion of their T-6 trainer (the AT-6) that included a weapons capability. What we were looking for was off the shelf stuff, not needing a long development period. For combat operations in the Middle East, this seemed like a good match. The aircraft that existed were two-seaters with light armor, good day/night electro-optical sensors, guns, and precision munitions. Unrefeueled, they had twice the loiter time of the fast jets. They sipped fuel - the fuel they burned in an hour of flight approximated the fuel an F-15E used taxiing from parking to the runway. We were looking at traditional attack aircraft - combat aircraft that could be used for a wide array of missions from Close Air Support to interdiction to combat search & rescue. In 2009 these aircraft could have flown from a dozen US-operated airfields in Afghanistan that could not have supported fast jets.

But making the case to an Air Force that had always been able to afford very high-end aircraft took time. The Air National Guard tested the AT-6 from 2010 to 2014 and judged it "operationally suitable and operationally effective." Ironically, it wasn't the combat capabilities of the aircraft that made the strongest case - it was the health of the rest of the fighter / attack enterprise. A quarter century of continuous operations was wrecking the force - readiness was the worst ever measured, aircraft sustainment costs were climbing, and the Air Force had long since run out of the cockpits we needed to turn freshly-graduated aviators into seasoned fighter pilots. The F-35, as capable as it is, could only provide a limited number of cockpits, and those not enough to "absorb" the new pilots to keep the force healthy. By 2016 we were short almost a thousand experienced fighter pilots, and the shortage was getting worse. The Air Force was buying fighter aircraft at a rate so slow that it was going to take us 200 years to recapitalize even the shrunken, post-drawdown force. We needed to return to a healthy balance - and that meant buying more aircraft. As the concept moved forward into a planned flying experiment in the summer of 2017, resistance mounted.