Battleship Admirals and the Fighter Mafia

Aviation week recently had an excellent article on the contributions of heavy bombers to the war in Afghanistan . It pointed out that while the fighters, especially those flying off of aircraft carriers, have gotten most of the press, most of the tonnage, 72%, have been dropped by a relative handful of heavy bombers.

The bombers, B-1s and the venerable B-52s who turned 50 last week, loiter at very high altitudes, responding more or less "on call". This is something that fighters, with their limited payloads and even more limited "legs" are either unable or poorly designed to do.

Thus the utility and importance of the heavy bomber is proven once again. Which begs the question: Why cut back the bomber fleet?

Fighters.

For decades the air force has been more or less "ruled" by what is called "the fighter mafia." Ever since it became apparent that nuclear bombers were never going to have to penetrate Soviet Airspace, the importance of bombers has been in precipitous decline. It was assumed that strategic bombing was never going to occur again. That being the case the much "cooler" fighters was where all the attention turned. Just as for years it was the helicopters and the tanks that dominated Army procurement, the fighters have been "where it's at" for the last two decades.

A big part of this is the nature of the missions. Most missions in "operations other than war" have been "pin-point" drops. And since we had lots of fighters capable of doing that and bombers were considered "indiscriminate", it was the fighters that got most of the combat missions.

Understand, there are three types of pilots in the Air Force, bombers, fighters and trash-haulers (transport.) Arguably there is a fourth, Close Air Support, but they're so unimportant they don't even rate a mention. Transport has never been considered of any real importance, it's only "trash-hauling" and "warriors" always have a say in any military. But because the Army and the Congress don't agree with this position, the transport guys got the C-17, which, in Tom Clancy's words, is "a trash-hauler with pretensions of grandeur." And up until the late 70s, when the B-2 program was initiated, bomber pilots were still in the running. If we ever had "the Big One", fighters weren't going to matter much. So there has been a see-saw battle for political control between fighter and bomber going back at least to WWII.

But with the fall of the Soviet Union , the balance of power swung fully to the fighters. Bombers were too big, too indiscriminate, to politically charged and way too expensive for most missions. In "Operations Other Than War" nobody needed or wanted 50,000 lbs of bombs dropped all over a city. Fighters could perform "surgical strikes." They looked cool and precise, as compared to the big, dangerous and random bombers.

In reality, bombers haven't been "random" in a long time. Even the "carpet" bombing raids in Vietnam involved fairly precise targeting. I could get into a long discussion of "Circular Error Probable" but the short answer is that the likelihood of a bomb hitting the target has gone up and up until now, under the right conditions, bombers flying at 65,000 ft can drop one ton of explosives across a football field from the "good guys."

Given this proven new utility, the ability to drop individual bombs, on-call, while "loitering" and waiting for the targeting information, the fighter mafia is in full-scale uproar. With the likelihood of a real battle for air-supremacy being unlikely in the near future, the need for such cornerstone programs as the F-22 and the F-35 become problematic. What's the point of a fighter that is designed to take on the most modern air-defenses and aircraft, when the probable threat is semi-medieval despots with AK-47 technology? And when spending the same money on upgrading existing systems will give ten times the "bang for the buck" on the probable targets?

Actually, very little. The likelihood of going to war with China or Russia , the only two countries with sufficient planes and technology to down a single F-15 in air to air combat, is vanishingly small. The money projected for the F-22 and F-35 procurement would be much better spent on technological upgrades for the current fleet of fighters and bombers. And smaller precision guided bombs so that "danger close" isn't a thousand yards.

But then the fighter mafia wouldn't get its toys.

Well the hell with the fighter mafia. Money is appropriated by Congress, not by the Air Force. With all due respect to General Jumper, it's time that the Congress took a good hard look at the needs of the nation and told the blue-suiters to get a grip. We don't need the Joint Strike Fighter nearly as much as we need a new generation of precision guided weapons. And it would be really nice to hold onto the platforms to deliver them.

The mission of the United States military is to enforce the political will of the American people. And in Afghanistan it wasn't F-18s and F-16s that got that will across to the Taliban. It was fifty year old B-52s.

Tim e for the Old Dog to learn new tricks. And the fighter mafia to give up the money for them.