You can’t do that, there’s not enough room on a carrier for all of that. Carriers are built for one thing and that’s to serve as a floating air base and form follows function so there’s no room for additional weapon’s systems. Despite their size, a carrier with a full air wing is a crowded place and it takes a…

Military aircraft are like that too, just take a look at the inside of a military cargo plane like a C-130 or at the top of the inside of transport helo like a CH-53 and you’ll see the same sort of exposed conduits and cabling. This is done for 2 reasons, 1) the military doesn’t care if it’s all exposed or not,…

Given the age of our BUFF fleet, I’ve always wondered if we’ve had multiple generations of pilots, crewman, and maintainers that have worked on literally the same plane that their fathers, and possibly even grandfathers, did. Could you imagine joining the Air Force, get assigned to fly in or work on and find out that…

Well put and something that people always overlook when discussing the number of aircraft carriers that we have. They forget about the time it takes for these ships to go to and from their destinations, training, down time for the crew, maintenance, and not to mention that the numbers are also split between east and…

Times have changed, and with China being more aggressive and expansionistic Japan probably feels that they need the change to their constitution in order to protect what they feel is rightfully theirs. Just because they have a pacifist constituion doesn’t mean their neighbors, ie China, is going to say, “Oh, hey…

My theory is that it has to do with their past history, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming in to the modern world and even they were slow to adapt to the modern world where as Japan, once the modern world was forced on them, embraced it whole heartedly. Then China suffered a series of civil wars during the…

The Air Force would never a change in the Key West Agreements, would fear a cut in their budget as a result of the loss of the CAS mission, and wouldn’t want to give up the personnel to the Army. On the Army’s side, they couldn’t afford to absorb the personnel and associated costs with operating the A-10, and it would…

The whole JSF program really should have been at least 2 different programs instead of just one. One program would have been for the Air Force and the Navy to replace their 16s & 18s, while a second program would have replaced the Harrier, instead, Gates thought that it would be a great idea to use a single base…

Where did you get 250nm range from? According to the Air Force’s own site, the range on an A-10 is 10x that at 2, 580 nm.

Despite what a lot of people might think, there’s nothing wrong with the US military buying foreign hardware, we’ve done that plenty of times in the past and continue to do so today. The key to this is that while the design may be of foreign origin the actual product has to be made here, whether it’s under license or…

No, not all. But it’s all a matter of context. If you’re seeing up close and in detail then you’re seeing very little around it like the location of friendlies, terrain features like hills and mountains, or potential AA threats around the target. Not saying that it doesn’t have its purpose, but sometimes there’s just…

But what are you seeing? You’re either getting a wide angle view where everything looks like clear ants, or you’re getting a clear view of a few things but nothing of the surrounding area. The first will help on the initial approach but the latter is going to be more of a hinderance than a help since you’re losing…

Not to mention that the original manufacturer, Fairchild/Republic, is no longer around, not even in name.

No, the Army can own fixed winged aircraft, they just can’t own and operate any that are armed.

There’s also the small matter of the Key West Agreements in where the Army agreed that they would not operate armed fixed winged aircraft, between them, operating bombers and fighters would be the Air Force’s job.

The other argument is that it flies too high and fast for effective CAS and can’t stay on station for very long either. While precision munitions are great and all the problem is that you won’t always have a JTAC assigned to a unit that’s in need of CAS, what do you do then? That’s when being able to fly low and slow…

The difference between 20 & 5 miles is the element of surprise. Unless your missiles can be launched from 21 miles out if they detect you launching at 20 milies then surprise is out the door and they can start preparing to counter your launch and/or shooting you down. The whole idea of stealth is to be able to get in…

I have no idea but it would be an ideal place for one, assuming that the APU doesn’t take up the entire “stinger”.

I think that they are but they have no good options at the moment. As much as they might dislike ll’ Kim, they dislike the idea of what chaos in North Korea would do, primarily they seriously dislike the idea of hordes of Northe Korean refugess crossing the border into China. They’re having issues with their economy…

What I’ve read here says that it’s an auxillary power supply. There was a post here that broke the Flanker series down and all but one had an APU, I think only one variant had a radar back there.