9 ms·

CAS is a job best done by relatively slow, but well armored aircraft flying low and slow. Pilots need to have time to develop awareness of both their allies and

by beloch 11y ago

CAS is a job best done by relatively slow, but well armored aircraft flying low and slow. Pilots need to have time to develop awareness of both their allies and their enemies. Pilots of this type of mission are going to come under fire, which is something the air force is fundamentally unwilling to accept. Marines in planes, on the other hand, are likely to accept similar risk to marines on the ground if it reduces risk for all. Given that CAS pilots must work most closely with those on the ground, it makes little sense for them to be air force. That being said, drones are probably the real A-10 killers. They can fly right down an enemy's throat without risking their pilot's lives. VR technology promises to give drone pilots a better field of view than any cockpit offers, and pilots could potentially switch control to a new drone when their previous drone is forced to return to base. This means one pilot could follow an engagement from start to finish, instead of multiple pilots trading off. This would greatly reduce the likelihood of pilot error and friendly fire incidents.

adamson 11y ago
"Marines in planes, on the other hand, are likely to accept similar risk to marines on the ground if it reduces risk for all." Is this an issue of different cultures within different departments, or different objectives, or what? I would hope that combined arms in a modern military would break down divisions in combat behavior like this
- beloch 11y ago
  Purely on the basis of training, equipment, and investment of taxpayer dollars, a pilot's life is worth a helluva lot more than an infantryman's life, and air force pilots are probably aware of this. They're like the modern day equivalent of noblemen as mounted heavy cavalry. They feel the duty to protect the peons with pitch-forks on the front lines, but they're not trained to do so recklessly. A platoon getting wiped out is a far smaller loss than losing a plane. Such are the economic realities of war. Pilot training no doubt reflects this. I honestly don't know much about marine aviator culture, but I'd be very surprised if they don't see themselves as having more in common with marine infantry than air force pilots do. That commonality probably makes them a lot more committed to keeping ground forces safe when flying CAS missions. I could be wrong. I am speculating here. I'd welcome the opinion of somebody in a position to know better.
  - awinter-py 11y ago
    That's a pretty strong statement to justify with 'no doubt'. DOD has a zillion ways they support the families of KIA soldiers. Even just looking at economics, losing 10 soldiers isn't cheap.
    - beloch 11y ago
      An F-35 starts at around $100M, and that's the plane the air force is touting to take over the CAS role. Does it really cost more than $10M per infantryman killed?
      - awinter-py 11y ago
        ok but the F-35 isn't the go-to plane for CAS right now. On the opposite end of the spectrum you can get an AC-208 'combat caravan' for $150k in non-sequential bills and a late-model hyundai sonata (KBB value $15k). Someone cooked up a model showing that the embraer super tucano would have been more effective in the CAS mission in afghanistan than some of the high power jets we used, in addition to 10x cheaper.
        paulmd 11y ago
        The USAF does not fly the AC208 or the Super Tucano in combat. There is no prize for hypothetical savings. I would love to see such airframes flown, they would be much more effective in many roles than "super-airframes" like the F-35. But that's not the US military philosophy. We fly the best and most expensive, even if it's 10x as expensive as an airframe that's 75% as effective. It's a calculation that government debt is cheaper than having to face the public over killed and captured soldiers.
        awinter-py 11y ago
        The writers arguing for this (not me, I don't have experience or expertise to have an opinion) say that cheaper airframes are more effective because of slower stall speed, ability to operate at lower altitude, and greater fuel stamina, all of which translate to better loiter characteristics. Also have heard that ground commanders hate the high-altitude planes for CAS because they're less likely to correctly discriminate the situtation on the ground before unloading. To your point -- yes, we don't operate AC208; I think iraq is the only one who does. (And if the sight of a hellfire stapled to the wing of a small turbopro doesn't make you want to run and hide, I don't know what will). But we also don't operate the F-35 in the CAS mission. neither plane is a good example of a CAS plane.
- woodman 11y ago
  All of the above. The USMC is designed to be quickly deployed in such a way that combat operations can continue to be performed with no support dependency (1-3 months, I don't remember). In order to make that happen they've duplicated a slimmed down version of a bunch of DOD components: air, armor, artillery, navy, etc. The moment one of those components underperforms in comparison to the fatter DOD version - it calls the whole endeavor into question, so there is considerable incentive to the folks at the top to make it work. Long story short: the USMC is a statically compiled version of kill.exe. They rotate the pilots to ground operations as well, FACs - forward air controllers, so there is a pretty close link at the company level: the FAC knows the pilots in the air. Rifle squad leaders are required to be qualified JFOs, joint fire observers, so for every 13 infantrymen you've got someone who can direct fire support. The common practice in the infantry is for individuals to train in tasks performed by the next two levels in one's chain of command, so every rifleman is effectively trained to interface with fire support. This requirement for interoperability is often reflect in weapon design: tanks have comm boxes on the back, grunt phones, where an infantryman can grab the phone and direct the tank commander. This leads to the implementation of the "billet supersedes rank" philosophy, where you often have a lance corporal instructing an officer - and the instruction is cheerfully met with "Direct fire B2, fire for effect, aye aye lance corporal". The effect of the culture can't be overstated, I've seen a lot of brave men from every branch, but in my experience as an infantry machinegunner - the USMC air wing operated on a whole other level of "Just make it happen". Judgement calls are made at a much lower level in the Corps, which can lead to emotion driven mistakes, but generally results in faster decisions by those with greater situation awareness.
superuser2 11y ago
Isn't the control latency a problem here? Firing a missile at a residence or car on the highway is one thing, but engaging an enemy who is engaging you back in a battlefield situation would seem to require that the pilot be experiencing and responding to the situation now, not a satellite roundtrip halfway around the world ago.
- beloch 11y ago
  I have to agree with this, but there's nothing saying that drone operators can't be situated closer to the action. They can operate from a ship off-shore or even a nearby ground facility or plane. Realistically though, a thousand kilometers of distance incurs only about half a millisecond of delay. The real issue is probably getting the latency of everything else in the chain down to a low level. e.g. One problem commercial VR systems are currently engaging is getting latency down to a level that doesn't make people feel sick. The standards for a military jet are probably a lot higher. On the bright side, a CAS fighter flying at a few hundred kilometers per hour is probably a much easier first-step for drone replacement than a supersonic fighter. I'm not saying the A-10 is obsolete yet, but it's likley going to be replaced by drones before any other manned fighters are.
  - voxic11 11y ago
    But for VR you can just have a ultra wide fov camera and then allow your pilots to look around that field with zero latency. The only latency would be with actual commands to the drone which shouldn't cause any problems with VR anyways.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - kpil 11y ago
      There is significant lattency in digital videos streams and also the render pipe. I don't know how they stream video but it can't be mpeg. Even with compressed independent frames that never spend on future frames you get the transfer window lattency so you need a lot of unjammable bandwidth. Line of sight transmitters? Ir lasers? Kind of a hard problem though as you might possibly want to not light up the whole country with your communications. And commodity hardware can't push frames without a lot of buffering. I guess they might afford custom display hardware but it's a complex problem too. I guess it would be easier to just send the coordinates where you want everything dead and get the popcorns. Bonus extra is everything that actually is a threat but I doubt that it's a actually a big concern when doing CAS, although I guess a A10 pilot might be able to spot schoolyards and kids if they are not under pressure.
drharby 11y ago
>Pilots of this type of mission are going to come under fire, which is something the air force is fundamentally unwilling to accept. O.o O Rly? and of the entire spec ops community down in Florida? >Given that CAS pilots must work most closely with those on the ground, it makes little sense for them to be air force. We literally have an entire command-control element built around reducing the latency between ground and air assets called the TACP (tactical air control party) >drones are probably the real A-10 killers. Alright, you earned some street cred back 6/10 comment
Shivetya 11y ago
well with improving optics and coordination who needs CAS drones, the things will be deployed anywhere on the horizon and either employ a rail gun or long term a laser to blanket an area. Railguns are frighteningly fast and don't require close proximity to their target to respond to a situation near instantly.
gozur88 11y ago
>CAS is a job best done by relatively slow, but well armored aircraft flying low and slow. That was true, but it's not true any more. Modern targeting pods (like the Siper XR pods on the B-1) mean you can get the same situational awareness from much farther away. Between targeting pods and laser guided weapons the A-10 is obsolete. Low and slow is dangerous. Aircraft defenses (lasers, flares, chaff, ECM) haven't been evolving as quickly as threats at low altitudes. Not by a long shot. You're fine against a dozen guys with rusty AK-47s and RPG-7s, but once you start fighting armies equipped with something like Pantsir or NASAMS you're in big trouble.
- paulmd 11y ago
  On the flip side, you're not any safer putting drones up against jamming technology, like GPS jammers and so on. China proved that tech when they put one of our stealth drones down in Iranian territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... There's certainly a middle ground between blowing up dudes with rusty AKs and fighting high-level proxy wars but honestly that barrier is paper-thin, nations like Russia and China will always be escalating that. It's always an arms race. Drones can react faster (for now) but humans can react appropriately.
- Warhawg01 11y ago
  A-10s having been flying with targeting pods (Litening and Sniper) and dropping laser and GPS-guided weapons for years. So how exactly has their presence made A-10 obsolete again?
  - arjie 11y ago
    Can't say I know very much about this, but if you can see and hit things well from a distance why go close? And if you don't need to go close, why do you need something that is built to go close over something that can carry more ordinance or fly for fewer dollars per hour or get there quicker? Surely it costs something (speed, flight range, maybe) to get the ability to go close and if you don't need that ability you can use that cost elsewhere.
omginternets 11y ago
The latency inherent in drone control is at odds with the need to develop an awareness of the battlefield situation. When your sensory data is out of date by up to 2 seconds, you're going to get a lot of blue-on-blue fire.
- woodman 11y ago
  If you are firing on a target that is so close to friendlies that 2 seconds of on the ground movement can make a difference, then that is a danger close fire mission - which is rare. They also lead to additional safety checks and procedures before final execution. For example: normally an aircraft could just drop ordinance from any angle, but for danger close they align the friendly unit with the target - dropping ordinance once they've passed over the friendlies. While a drone can't really do that, the detached nature of the operator would actually be an advantage in that situation. If I had to choose between someone dropping bombs near me with a Google maps like interface or some dude rolling in riding 30 tons of angry aircraft, I'd choose the point and click option.
  - omginternets 11y ago
    Former jarhead here, familiar with "danger close" ;) My point was just that, though: 2s of latency on a danger close fire-mission is something that brings the pucker-factor up to a solid 9. At least for me, the (former) grunt on the ground.
    - woodman 11y ago
      Huh, I just assumed you were AF because you've made the same argument that they use for dragging their feet on drone deployment - the value added by retaining a large amount of human judgement in process that no longer requires it. I imagine the folks who got replaced by standardized tooling during the industrial revolution made the same obviously self serving argument. Well grunts can disagree, I was an 0331 ten years ago, but you've got me curious about what experience has informed your thinking on this matter. I've only been down range of danger close fire missions twice, and in neither case were we moving around much. The first was when we were pinned down, and the other was when our foot patrol stumbled onto a numerically superior enemy with technicals. I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where a danger close is made any more dangerous by adding a two second delay. Even in a scenario where your FDL is breached and you're poking people to death, there is a clear delineation - you aren't running past your attackers. A flanking maneuver would confusing that delineation, but that takes a lot longer than whatever delay the drone operator faces.

by beloch 11y ago

adamson 11y ago

"Marines in planes, on the other hand, are likely to accept similar risk to marines on the ground if it reduces risk for all." Is this an issue of different cultures within different departments, or different objectives, or what? I would hope that combined arms in a modern military would break down divisions in combat behavior like this

beloch 11y ago
Purely on the basis of training, equipment, and investment of taxpayer dollars, a pilot's life is worth a helluva lot more than an infantryman's life, and air force pilots are probably aware of this. They're like the modern day equivalent of noblemen as mounted heavy cavalry. They feel the duty to protect the peons with pitch-forks on the front lines, but they're not trained to do so recklessly. A platoon getting wiped out is a far smaller loss than losing a plane. Such are the economic realities of war. Pilot training no doubt reflects this. I honestly don't know much about marine aviator culture, but I'd be very surprised if they don't see themselves as having more in common with marine infantry than air force pilots do. That commonality probably makes them a lot more committed to keeping ground forces safe when flying CAS missions. I could be wrong. I am speculating here. I'd welcome the opinion of somebody in a position to know better.
- awinter-py 11y ago
  That's a pretty strong statement to justify with 'no doubt'. DOD has a zillion ways they support the families of KIA soldiers. Even just looking at economics, losing 10 soldiers isn't cheap.
  - beloch 11y ago
    An F-35 starts at around $100M, and that's the plane the air force is touting to take over the CAS role. Does it really cost more than $10M per infantryman killed?
    - awinter-py 11y ago
      ok but the F-35 isn't the go-to plane for CAS right now. On the opposite end of the spectrum you can get an AC-208 'combat caravan' for $150k in non-sequential bills and a late-model hyundai sonata (KBB value $15k). Someone cooked up a model showing that the embraer super tucano would have been more effective in the CAS mission in afghanistan than some of the high power jets we used, in addition to 10x cheaper.
      - paulmd 11y ago
        The USAF does not fly the AC208 or the Super Tucano in combat. There is no prize for hypothetical savings. I would love to see such airframes flown, they would be much more effective in many roles than "super-airframes" like the F-35. But that's not the US military philosophy. We fly the best and most expensive, even if it's 10x as expensive as an airframe that's 75% as effective. It's a calculation that government debt is cheaper than having to face the public over killed and captured soldiers.
        awinter-py 11y ago
        The writers arguing for this (not me, I don't have experience or expertise to have an opinion) say that cheaper airframes are more effective because of slower stall speed, ability to operate at lower altitude, and greater fuel stamina, all of which translate to better loiter characteristics. Also have heard that ground commanders hate the high-altitude planes for CAS because they're less likely to correctly discriminate the situtation on the ground before unloading. To your point -- yes, we don't operate AC208; I think iraq is the only one who does. (And if the sight of a hellfire stapled to the wing of a small turbopro doesn't make you want to run and hide, I don't know what will). But we also don't operate the F-35 in the CAS mission. neither plane is a good example of a CAS plane.
woodman 11y ago
All of the above. The USMC is designed to be quickly deployed in such a way that combat operations can continue to be performed with no support dependency (1-3 months, I don't remember). In order to make that happen they've duplicated a slimmed down version of a bunch of DOD components: air, armor, artillery, navy, etc. The moment one of those components underperforms in comparison to the fatter DOD version - it calls the whole endeavor into question, so there is considerable incentive to the folks at the top to make it work. Long story short: the USMC is a statically compiled version of kill.exe. They rotate the pilots to ground operations as well, FACs - forward air controllers, so there is a pretty close link at the company level: the FAC knows the pilots in the air. Rifle squad leaders are required to be qualified JFOs, joint fire observers, so for every 13 infantrymen you've got someone who can direct fire support. The common practice in the infantry is for individuals to train in tasks performed by the next two levels in one's chain of command, so every rifleman is effectively trained to interface with fire support. This requirement for interoperability is often reflect in weapon design: tanks have comm boxes on the back, grunt phones, where an infantryman can grab the phone and direct the tank commander. This leads to the implementation of the "billet supersedes rank" philosophy, where you often have a lance corporal instructing an officer - and the instruction is cheerfully met with "Direct fire B2, fire for effect, aye aye lance corporal". The effect of the culture can't be overstated, I've seen a lot of brave men from every branch, but in my experience as an infantry machinegunner - the USMC air wing operated on a whole other level of "Just make it happen". Judgement calls are made at a much lower level in the Corps, which can lead to emotion driven mistakes, but generally results in faster decisions by those with greater situation awareness.

superuser2 11y ago

Isn't the control latency a problem here? Firing a missile at a residence or car on the highway is one thing, but engaging an enemy who is engaging you back in a battlefield situation would seem to require that the pilot be experiencing and responding to the situation now, not a satellite roundtrip halfway around the world ago.

beloch 11y ago
I have to agree with this, but there's nothing saying that drone operators can't be situated closer to the action. They can operate from a ship off-shore or even a nearby ground facility or plane. Realistically though, a thousand kilometers of distance incurs only about half a millisecond of delay. The real issue is probably getting the latency of everything else in the chain down to a low level. e.g. One problem commercial VR systems are currently engaging is getting latency down to a level that doesn't make people feel sick. The standards for a military jet are probably a lot higher. On the bright side, a CAS fighter flying at a few hundred kilometers per hour is probably a much easier first-step for drone replacement than a supersonic fighter. I'm not saying the A-10 is obsolete yet, but it's likley going to be replaced by drones before any other manned fighters are.
- voxic11 11y ago
  But for VR you can just have a ultra wide fov camera and then allow your pilots to look around that field with zero latency. The only latency would be with actual commands to the drone which shouldn't cause any problems with VR anyways.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kpil 11y ago
    There is significant lattency in digital videos streams and also the render pipe. I don't know how they stream video but it can't be mpeg. Even with compressed independent frames that never spend on future frames you get the transfer window lattency so you need a lot of unjammable bandwidth. Line of sight transmitters? Ir lasers? Kind of a hard problem though as you might possibly want to not light up the whole country with your communications. And commodity hardware can't push frames without a lot of buffering. I guess they might afford custom display hardware but it's a complex problem too. I guess it would be easier to just send the coordinates where you want everything dead and get the popcorns. Bonus extra is everything that actually is a threat but I doubt that it's a actually a big concern when doing CAS, although I guess a A10 pilot might be able to spot schoolyards and kids if they are not under pressure.

drharby 11y ago

>Pilots of this type of mission are going to come under fire, which is something the air force is fundamentally unwilling to accept. O.o O Rly? and of the entire spec ops community down in Florida? >Given that CAS pilots must work most closely with those on the ground, it makes little sense for them to be air force. We literally have an entire command-control element built around reducing the latency between ground and air assets called the TACP (tactical air control party) >drones are probably the real A-10 killers. Alright, you earned some street cred back 6/10 comment

Shivetya 11y ago

well with improving optics and coordination who needs CAS drones, the things will be deployed anywhere on the horizon and either employ a rail gun or long term a laser to blanket an area. Railguns are frighteningly fast and don't require close proximity to their target to respond to a situation near instantly.

gozur88 11y ago

>CAS is a job best done by relatively slow, but well armored aircraft flying low and slow. That was true, but it's not true any more. Modern targeting pods (like the Siper XR pods on the B-1) mean you can get the same situational awareness from much farther away. Between targeting pods and laser guided weapons the A-10 is obsolete. Low and slow is dangerous. Aircraft defenses (lasers, flares, chaff, ECM) haven't been evolving as quickly as threats at low altitudes. Not by a long shot. You're fine against a dozen guys with rusty AK-47s and RPG-7s, but once you start fighting armies equipped with something like Pantsir or NASAMS you're in big trouble.

paulmd 11y ago
On the flip side, you're not any safer putting drones up against jamming technology, like GPS jammers and so on. China proved that tech when they put one of our stealth drones down in Iranian territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... There's certainly a middle ground between blowing up dudes with rusty AKs and fighting high-level proxy wars but honestly that barrier is paper-thin, nations like Russia and China will always be escalating that. It's always an arms race. Drones can react faster (for now) but humans can react appropriately.
Warhawg01 11y ago
A-10s having been flying with targeting pods (Litening and Sniper) and dropping laser and GPS-guided weapons for years. So how exactly has their presence made A-10 obsolete again?
- arjie 11y ago
  Can't say I know very much about this, but if you can see and hit things well from a distance why go close? And if you don't need to go close, why do you need something that is built to go close over something that can carry more ordinance or fly for fewer dollars per hour or get there quicker? Surely it costs something (speed, flight range, maybe) to get the ability to go close and if you don't need that ability you can use that cost elsewhere.

omginternets 11y ago

The latency inherent in drone control is at odds with the need to develop an awareness of the battlefield situation. When your sensory data is out of date by up to 2 seconds, you're going to get a lot of blue-on-blue fire.

woodman 11y ago
If you are firing on a target that is so close to friendlies that 2 seconds of on the ground movement can make a difference, then that is a danger close fire mission - which is rare. They also lead to additional safety checks and procedures before final execution. For example: normally an aircraft could just drop ordinance from any angle, but for danger close they align the friendly unit with the target - dropping ordinance once they've passed over the friendlies. While a drone can't really do that, the detached nature of the operator would actually be an advantage in that situation. If I had to choose between someone dropping bombs near me with a Google maps like interface or some dude rolling in riding 30 tons of angry aircraft, I'd choose the point and click option.
- omginternets 11y ago
  Former jarhead here, familiar with "danger close" ;) My point was just that, though: 2s of latency on a danger close fire-mission is something that brings the pucker-factor up to a solid 9. At least for me, the (former) grunt on the ground.
  - woodman 11y ago
    Huh, I just assumed you were AF because you've made the same argument that they use for dragging their feet on drone deployment - the value added by retaining a large amount of human judgement in process that no longer requires it. I imagine the folks who got replaced by standardized tooling during the industrial revolution made the same obviously self serving argument. Well grunts can disagree, I was an 0331 ten years ago, but you've got me curious about what experience has informed your thinking on this matter. I've only been down range of danger close fire missions twice, and in neither case were we moving around much. The first was when we were pinned down, and the other was when our foot patrol stumbled onto a numerically superior enemy with technicals. I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where a danger close is made any more dangerous by adding a two second delay. Even in a scenario where your FDL is breached and you're poking people to death, there is a clear delineation - you aren't running past your attackers. A flanking maneuver would confusing that delineation, but that takes a lot longer than whatever delay the drone operator faces.