At first, I was not at all enthused about the Air Force’s new Sky Warden platform, a step back to a single-seat, propeller-driven combat aircraft not used since the Douglas A-1 Skyraider was retired in 1973. Some background:
U.S. Special Operations Command on Monday announced it has selected the AT-802U Sky Warden, made by L3Harris Technologies and Air Tractor, for its Armed Overwatch program.
The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract will be worth up to $3 billion, L3Harris said in a release Monday. The initial program contract award is for $170 million.
Air Tractor is an aircraft manufacturer from Olney, Texas, that typically makes firefighting aircraft and agricultural planes such as crop dusters.
Initial production of the Sky Warden will take place at Air Tractor’s facility in Olney. L3Harris will then modify those planes into the Armed Overwatch mission configuration at its Tulsa, Oklahoma modification center, beginning in 2023. L3Harris said work will also take place at its other sites in Greenville, Rockwall and Waco, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee.
Air Force Special Operations Command’s Armed Overwatch program aims to build a fleet of up to 75 flexible, fixed-wing aircraft suitable for deployment to austere locations, with little logistical tail needed to keep them operating.
SOCOM is planning for the single-engine Sky Warden, as AFSOC’s Armed Overwatch plane, to be able to provide close air support, precision strike and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for counterterrorism operations and irregular warfare.
When I heard that the Air Force was considering going back to a prop plane for a ground attack aircraft, I thought that: A.) This was a sign of their continuing disdain for the A-10, and B.) This was a role better suited for drones that manned aircraft, and thus the Air Force wanted it only to keep their institutional budget up, since anyone can fly a drone.
However, if it’s specifically geared toward supporting special forces operations, then the move makes a lot more sense. In that case, you need the hyper-loiter capabilities, and larger drones can be of limited use if you’re out of line-of-radio-control (say, in mountainous terrain) and you don’t have them set up for satellite relay.
Here’s a YouTuber who’s quite enthusiastic about it:
The Pentagon is spending $3 million for the program, which is a lot of cheddar by normal people standards, but nothing by Pentagon standards. Being the biggest and baddest on the bloc means you can buy niche role weapons like this.
While it remains to be seen if this is effective in modern combat, it’s hardly the first time the U.S. military has done this. In World War II, spotter pilot Charles Carpenter put bazookas on his Piper Cub and successfully took out panzers.
(Trivia: The last P-51 used by the U.S. military was actually used by the army as a chase aircraft for helicopters in 1968.)
Tags: Air Force, aircraft, Charles Carpenter, Military, Sky Warden, The Fat Electrician, video, World War II
There’s been a lot of talk about the Army trying to take back the close support mission because the blue sky Air force guys aren’t interested in ground support. The AF mafia types are all about fighters, bombers, and missiles. This is what almost has and will eventually do in the A10.
I’m immediately reminded of the U-28 Draco, a single-engine turbo prop that SOCOM has been using as a nondescript, cheap to operate, and operate from anywhere transport/recon platform for the past decade and a half. The Sky Warden sounds like an armed counterpart.
In both cases they’re converted civilian jobs filled with modern military sensors (and weapons in the case of the Sky Warden.) Mind, people are a lot less likely to take the Warden for a civvie with all that hardware hanging underneath the wings; at the same time, it’s going to be super obvious to any radar that can tag it.
It’s actually a two-seater with a GIB/WSO to manage all the sensors. That extra pair of eyes [and SA] is what the hog was always lacking.
I saw and loved the Skyraider and depended on them in II Corps. They carried a hell of a payload and could deliver it within 100 yards of our positions. Most modern wars will not involve major powers but rather people fighting contrary to the rules set up in Geneva, I’d rather have something like the A-1 than an F-15. The enemy will be hard pressed to down such aircraft as a 50 caliber is not usually found outside of base camps. Its doubtful the G’s will have many, if any, surface to air missiles.
Ground support missions should be handed over to the Army, where they belong. But given our leadership I doubt funding will be available for any real numbers of them. Besides, one tires of the endless no-win wars Washington so loves.
Branching the military was a conceptual disaster, when you get right down to it.
Each branch wants to focus on its sexiest, most perceived-to-be-prestigious aspect of whatever era you’re looking at. For the longest time, that was the Cavalry for the Army, battleships for the Navy, and so on and so forth.
Things ought to be organized differently, with attention paid to putting everything on a given field of combat under the same unified command. “Tactical aviation” as a component of the strategic aviation force shouldn’t even be a thing; it ought to be a fully-integrated part of the forces doing ground combat. Likewise with naval operations; there are deep water ops, and then there are the ones in around the continental shelves where land interfaces with water. The fact that the Army had to use friggin’ bridge erection boats as goddamn waterway patrol boats in the river systems of Iraq, while the Navy didn’t even have a brown-water riverine force ready to operate in that theater is a criminal flaw in how we think about these things.
And, it’s lazy thinking that does this to us, more than anything: “Oh, it’s fixed-wing… Air Force”. The reality is that it ought to be divided up by “combat action environment”, to coin a term; if it’s land-based, then anything that connects immediately to it ought to be under the same command and element. The Army should have had the ability to reach out and task for aviation and naval assets that were centrally-pooled and kept available for that sort of use; as well, they ought to get a say in other service budgets when it comes to these things, because someone is damn sure going to have to do the job. We didn’t even have decent coverage of the waterways of Iraq until well into the late 2000s; that was the fault of the Navy, who “depreciated” brown-water service and everything associated with it.
Here’s a question for you: If WWIII had come to the European and Eastern European theaters, who was going to cover down on the various river networks? Anyone? Nope; there were really zero effective plans for anything being done about that. It was all going to be left up to the Europeans, who also didn’t bother to do much about it. Yet, if you look? Both Europe and Eastern Europe have immense communications performed by barges on rivers and canals. Nobody has a military service that even pays attention to that field, unless it’s just the customs police. US Navy sure as hell won’t; you don’t want to know what they said about doing anything in the Balkans, and I guarantee you that they’ll totally blow off doing anything along the Volga or other rivers in Eastern Europe if the lid comes off of Russia.
The mistake is in branching, at all. It ought to entirely polyvalent, and multi-purpose, branch-agnostic. If it calls for deep-water blue navy action, then the Navy is obviously the way to go. But, with the way they’ve abandoned and utterly depreciated brown-water naval ops, they can’t be trusted with either close in-shore or riverine operations at all. Same with the Air Force; they want to only do the sexy, “Knights of the Sky” BS that gets them budget slice. Everything else? They just don’t give a f*ck, demonstrably.
Break it down by “combat action environment”, and give total control of everything in that zone to one branch. Period. If the Army reaches out and says “Hey, we need these rivers patrolled…”, then the Navy or Coast Guard ought to have forces ready to go, in order to do that. If they won’t, and the Army has identified a need…? Then, the Army needs to reach out and grab a slice of the Navy and Air Force budget so as to be able to cover down on these missions that nobody wants.
It’s really flippin’ criminal, the way it went down in Iraq. The Air Force wasn’t all that interested in doing a lot of ground support missions, but there was nothing the Army could do to force the issue. Same-same with the Navy; we asked for riverine forces, were told they didn’t exist.
And, when you stop and think about it, a lot of the history we’ve got with this crap is flatly f*cking insane: In Vietnam, for example, who ran the Delta? Oh, yeah, that’s right: Army, in the form of the 9th ID. Where’d we put the Marines? Oh, yeah… Right where they belonged: Securing the Northern border of Vietnam, butting up against the NVA with all its tanks and such. WTF?
I mean, what did I miss? Wouldn’t “Sea Soldiers” be the natural fit for river delta, doing all that amphibious work? Shouldn’t the Marines have gotten that tasking, vice 9th ID? Which was, I remind you, a leg Infantry division in those days…
You get down to it, and it’s flatly nuts, the way we’ve done things. Look at Europe, for another example: Because of the end-of-war deployments, the US forces were mostly in the south of Germany. Precisely where they were least necessary and least likely to do much good. The North German Plain was where we had the UK, the Dutch, and the Belgians going into action, against what would have been the most likely place for the Soviets to commit their main forces. Why? Never made a damn bit of sense, really… South Germany was where the US was located at the end of WWII, and that’s where we deployed for the Cold War, ‘cos that’s where we already were. Made not the least strategic sense, whatsoever… Logic would have put the US armored divisions where they would have done the most good, right there in front of the Soviet main line of attack, not down south in a secondary theater that we couldn’t threaten much from, strategically. Oh, and let’s not forget the supply lines…
Whole thing was madness personified, when you got down to it. And, we keep falling into these stupidities because nobody wants to break anything up along logical lines, or re-examine existing paradigms for any flaws.
Looks like it might be useful for border control operations. Maybe Texas should buy a few hundred…
Smartest comment in weeks, Kirk. Of course the Pentagon will never go for it. Too many cushy jobs at stake. Who need a better organized military when so many fat pensions might be lost.
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@Garrett Stasse,
Yeah, although I don’t think it’s so much the pensions that are the issue; it is the hidebound thinking, more than anything else. You’re going to have the personnel expenses, no matter what. The question is, what are you getting for your money?
The current setup and mindset is totally ossified and entirely locked into the past; what gets done is only that which was done, before. Nobody looks out to the horizon, for what’s coming next. They refuse to do even the least-effort projections of likely future combat trends, and then act to deal with them.
The problem is how we organize this crap, more than anything else. Look at the madness inherent to the Army/Air Force relationship: The Air Force resents the Army’s need for ground support, and does everything it can to limit its commitment to that. The Air Force doesn’t even like doing things like air transport, or anything at all that might influence the cut of the budget they get to support manned combat aircraft, because that’s where the prestige and the promotions are.
Which is nuts. Why should the “good jobs” go to the guy who was a fighter pilot? Aren’t the other missions equally important?
The services all have these idiotic “union” stovepipe structures, which serve to channelize and actively prevent pragmatic preventive actions. Nobody wants to take responsibility for things that fall outside the various and sundry stovepipes, ‘cos then that would mean that they’d have to actually do something.
Want to know why we had such a huge problem with the IED campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan? It’s not because we didn’t see the need coming, because many of us did, it’s because the issue fell in between the various stovepipes we’ve set up in our structure. Engineer stovepipe didn’t see “battlefield freedom of communication” as their job; neither did anyone else. The purblind morons looked at the potential IED issues as being “not my problem”, and so they did nothing.
This isn’t a money issue, either… It’s a mentality issue. They define problems as being within a certain specific stovepipe, and that’s it. Only thing is, new problems are always cropping up outside the limits of those stovepipes. The problem is a conceptual flaw in how we look at military operations; we see everything in terms of how we’ve done things in the past. “Oh, this is a Cavalry issue… Needs horsiness for the Cav to get involved…” when the actual issue was that you need a mobility-centric branch that has independence of action in order to deal with fast-moving tactical issues. The horse was a means to an end, just the way the tank or the fighter is. But, because we stovepipe these things into “Fighter Command” and “Armor”, we automatically limit the scope and depth of our thinking; if you’re a hammer, then all your problems tend to look a lot like nails…
The reality of it all is that war is not a stovepipe affair; it is a holistic thing, a creature of many parts that fall outside the narrow limits of the remand our organizational structures give to commanders and mid-level leaders. If, instead of saying to someone “You’re the theater Engineer, responsible for roads and bridges…” you were to say “You’re the guy responsible for making sure we can get from point “A” in the rear to point “B” elsewhere in the theater…”, you’d open up everyone’s thinking on the issue, and then maybe the guy who was wearing the Engineer castles would start to think in terms of maintaining road communications as being a bit more than bridges and road networks…
Reminds me of ….
We have to stop using paperbags cause duh trees.
Soooo, we go to plastic bags.
We have to stop using plastic bags cause duh whales.
So we go back to paperbags.
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