Triton said:
Concerning the A/FX, it sounds like the United States Air Force has, or had, a "not invented here" bias against Navy aircraft even though they were in need of a replacement for the F-111, F-15E, and F-117A and had participated in the AX program since its initiation. Was there any effort to save the program as a joint program between the United States Navy and United States Air Force? Or point out the 20% parts commonality between the F-22 Raptor and the Lockheed Martin/Boeing A/FX proposal? Or at the time, did the United States Air Force believe that the air interdiction mission was not as important as other missions or would have preferred the FB-22 to the A/FX? Was an F-16 replacement deemed more urgent?
A/FX was a linear descendant of the ATA-12. It was made into a cubist F-14 because the USN, as they had when forced to join on the F-111B effort (vastly superior to the F-14 in the FADF mission btw.), saw where the USAF was going on ATF and _self sabotaged_ the Avenger II with a myriad of contractor/government stunts which pushed the boundaries of Fraud in the Inducement and Anti Deficiency Act restrictions.
They have done it before, see Coulam on the F-111B and the 'N-1 package' of naval modifications, introduced late enough to make sure that their side of the program failed, the USAF had to spend megabucks to get their interdictor into service after the USN preemptively (before carrier suitability testing) got their variant cancelled and _in so doing_, destroyed the F-X(15)'s nice-to-haves like the Eagle Eye optical adjunct, AIM-92 CLAW, and the developed radar data computer which had to wait until half the jets were built. Essentially rendering the entire F-15A fleet into an FSD hangar queen extension.
The USAF never pulled such a stunt. Even when the ATA was shown to need an Edwards sized field length to make maximum gross weight takeoffs, they stuck by their 600 requirement on the A-12. It was the USMC who put the Kaibosh on the ATA, pulling their requirement for 200 or so jets and automatically taking the 'office party' price from '35 million or we don't buy the thing' (USN Navair Admiral in charge of overall R&D) to what a savvy reporter rand the numbers on and figured would be a minimum 73 million. And /he/ was off (short) by over 80 million.
I myself have often wondered if the A-12 wasn't simply a placeholder (geopolitical bluff) to get the Soviets to bankroll another 'same mission, similar airframe' development effort as part of the giant Reagan era attempt to call on every raise until the other side ran out of chips.
There was simply too much that was DEAD WRONG with the ATA, technically and programmatically, from the beginning. Putting a Navy Captain in charge of a multibillion dollar program and then lying to the contractor on agreed weights (2-4,000lbs over = inability to complete the contract which is not something the Federal Government is allowed to do while acting as an executor for the public exchequer, it's not their money...) while the absence of the COEA/MENS studies makes it impossible to develop a doctrinal model that makes sense.
Winning wars is about DMPIs per day, to XXnm downrange. Not to be a 'Top Gun' mood killer but really it is about statistics of targets serviced and nothing more. Everything that effects that (EA-6B jammers and F/A-18 HARM shooters) is an important variable but only insofar as it ups the number of designated mean points of impact which are hit. If you want cheap, put 4 JASSM-ER on your jet and forego target penetration. You will get more hits and fewer megabuck losses while paying less for a 100-300nm standoff bus platform than you ever would undertaking the same mission with hammer class heavy ordnance as direct delivery.
If your system is so expensive that you are operating as an A-6 equivalent with 10-12 jets on deck and half of them down for LO maintenance at any given moment, EVEN WITH simply silly assigned warloads of X24 internal Mk.82, you are not going to be survivable at radius because your escorts cannot reach 1,000nm like you can and you can only do so (subsonically) once per day.
The USN _did not_ yield deep strike as a Tomahawk can go 900nm in 3hrs and has no RTB requirement. But if you look at the USN problem of sustaining the hulls as the airwings that ride on them, you start to see that a 150 million dollar Avenger II is the same as saying a deckload of ONLY A-12s and nothing else. This killed the ATA, sure and simple. Because it never would have worked without the support sorties and now you have just killed the airwing constellation for TWO reasons: radius+cost.
The USN CFU ended up costing everyone as the F/A-18E (a new build passed off as a redesign that failed almost every KPP metric of a pass/fail OPEVAL, including radius of action) became a 'get it or we lose carrier air' mandate which stole money from the F-22 and C-17 and ASTOVL efforts as well as ongoing upgrade and training/maintenance on the Harrier and Bug (the USMC was essentially a non-air exponent for much of the 90s).
The USAF was quite happy to finish out the 2000-2010 period buying upgraded F-16s (or Agiles) and completing their Raptor buy until they could BEGIN thinking about CALF. But the USN complete trainwreck of the tacair acquisition, dogpiling multiple new starts onto a cluttered production schedule, ruined everything and made the F-22 die so that the Navy and Marines could have a lower quality Sea Stealth. Which their TAMP 2001
agreement promptly chopped up from 600+480 to 400+250 which is ALSO not enough to sustain a deep strike capability. Especially on a weight critical STOVL which will normally operate with 10-12Klbs to allow for external ordnance and hot'n'hi effects on it's thrust reserves, massively increasing drag and taking a nominal 460nm radius down to about 250nm, tops.
This in turn skewered the USAF plan to have a supercruise to 1,000nm change of game in the Raptor while leaving them stuck with the check on the majority of the F-35A purchase which is, functionally, little more than an F-117 replacement, including the utterly moronic choice to go for a deep-not-broad weapons bay (room for the SDLF module) which is designed around the GBU-31 munition with only 10-12nm of standoff. 10-12nm from an SA-20/21 is at least 15nm past WEZ/NEZ on the SAM.
IMO, the USN should never be allowed to touch another tacair program again, ever. Their nasty habit as constant strategy of sabotaging what they cannot control directly makes Dassault and the French look like saints.