Some time ago, I was pondering the state of our air power in terms of its being able to police Third-World conflicts. Frankly, it made no sense to me (and still doesn’t) that we would need to spend x million dollars to send a jet fighter (or even an Apache chopper) just to drop a missile on an Afghani wedding party, when even a simpleton like me could see that the same job could have been executed by a WWII-era P-51 Mustang for about a jillion dollars less.
Seems like someone in the Pentagon has been having similar thoughts:
US Special Operations Command is moving forward with its armed overwatch plan, independent of the Air Force’s light attack experiment, inviting industry for a briefing on a proposal to buy an estimated 75 aircraft.
SOCOM will hold Industry Days March 4-5 for the Armed Overwatch program, which will “provide Special Operations Forces deployable and sustainable manned aircraft systems” that will be used for “close air support, precision strike, and SOF intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in austere and permissive environments.”
And here are the stats on one of the bad boys they’re considering.
My only question is: why only 75? Why not five hundred and seventy-five? I mean, instead of sending a few missiles from one plane onto a target opportunity of fuzzy-wuzzies, why not go Full Dresden and rain a hundred missiles or so on their turbanned asses? I’m not talking of big, expensive missiles here; just some little Radio Shack-type sweeties that can get the same message across for far less money.
And let’s not forget the magic word “jobs” (pilots and navigators/fire-controllers) which would flow from this expansion — one more stat God-Emperor Trump can add to his next employment report.
By the way: I love the paint job on these planes, although in today’s .dotmil, they’ll no doubt be outlawed because they frighten the enemy too much. Don’t get me started.
Oh, and one last thing: “deployable and sustainable aircraft systems”? Whatever happened to simple expressions like “aircraft” or even better, “airplanes”? Fucking nimrods.
