Our intelligence service worked long and hard to uncover bin Laden’s hiding place. Seal Team Six was dispatched and they made short work of the handful of guards and family members in the al Queda leader’s fortress.
We’re still celebrating but the men of Seal Team Six have gone right back to work. The next time they deploy they might have to do so lacking vital protection. Our fixed wing gunship fleet is too small, aging, and they’ve been running nonstop for a decade. A smaller plane able to operate closer to the action has been cancelled outright.
We haven’t lost a Specter or Spooky since Desert Storm but one day soon a center wing box is going to let go with a bang, killing the thirteen Air Force personnel aboard and leaving one of our special forces units stranded without the potent close air support these planes provide.
Seal Team Six did a heroic job of protecting our nation. Now we need to do our part to protect them.
Two years ago I wrote Special Forces Needs Gunships for The Cutting Edge News. Our fixed wing gunship fleet, comprised of eight Vietnam era AC-130H Specter and seventeen 1990s vintage AC-130U Spooky planes was in shabby condition then.
I found an article in Air Force Magazine from last summer that describes a fleet that is just now starting to get needed upgrades.
The squadron possesses 17 AC-130Us. On any given day, only about five are available for operations. Most of the U models are receiving new center wing boxes, and others are beginning their programmed depot maintenance cycle earlier than anticipated. Fleet management is a “day-to-day” task, said Cartier. This makes it even harder to balance training and operations.
“We’ve worked hard to replace old aircraft that have flown up to three times their planned utilization rates,” Chapman said. “In five years, we’re going to look completely different.”
Plans call for Air Force Special Operations Command to request $1.6 billion to begin replacing the fleet’s Vietnam-era AC-130H Spectre gunships with modern J models. The new gunships will be bought between Fiscal 2011 and Fiscal 2015.
So the plan appears to be this: eight planes that are nearly as old as I am are going to get a well earned rest and sixteen of the new AC-130J will join the fleet, bringing the total from twenty five to thirty three planes.
However, the command hopes to fill a portion of the gunship gap by the end of this year. It will do so by modifying existing aircraft. MC-130W Combat Spear aircraft are being equipped and tested with the precision strike package, an upgrade to the modified C-130, which will give the aircraft armed overwatch tools to assist SOF teams in combat.
In March, Adm. Eric T. Olson, commander of the multiservice US Special Operations Command, said the Air Force is fielding four aircraft fitted with the package. Dubbed Dragon Spears, the former tankers of the 73rd SOS at Cannon, will receive sensor upgrades, a standoff precision guided munitions system, a 30 mm gun, and new sensor and communications gear.
The retrofitted tankers are a temporary fix for AFSOC’s stressed gunship fleet in the near term, and are making up for the cancellation of the “light gunship” concept.
The “light gunship” mentioned was the AC-27J Stinger II, a twin engine plane that would have carried two 30mm cannons that share ammunition with the A-10 Thunderbolt II as well as precision guided weapons of the same type carried by the MQ-9 Reaper drone.
So this looks like a good plan for the big, hard hitting aircraft, but we don’t get the smaller, lighter Stinger II which could operate from rough facilities closer to the action. I think this cancellation leaves an opening for Imminent Fury.
This little plane, an Embraer Super Tucano, is purpose built for close air support and is already broadly used in South America.
Speaking March 12 at an exposition on expeditionary warfare in Virginia Beach, Va., Navy Captain Mark Mullins said the intent is to put four of the single-engine aircraft into the fight as quickly as possible.
"Now we're in an operational pause, trying to figure out how to get to Phase II. We need about $44 million," he said. "Back to the method of venture capitalism, we're working with the Air Force and Marine Corps, socializing it with those guys to see if we can get money invested and get to Phase II, where we're taking four aircraft into theater."
So we have two action items here, people.
The large gunships are a relatively small part of the Air Force and they can sometimes be politically overlooked. I can think of no better thing we could do for Special Forces than to stand over this issue and make sure those MC-130J Dragon Spears are delivered in a timely fashion.
The report on the Imminent Fury is very promising and this type of aircraft is something we’ve had in every battle from World War I until Vietnam. Helicopters have taken over some of the duties in this area, but there are things a small fixed wing aircraft can do that they can not. This little plane combines the best of what the big gunship and our largest drone provide to our ground forces in a package that can closely integrate with small units in the field.
Seal Team Six did an amazing job and Congress promptly honored them with a resolution yesterday. Now they need to protect them with an immediate $44 million to move Imminent Fury forward, and we need to check and make sure the needed upgrades for the larger gunships have not stalled for some reason.