Good. I am glad you agree it is about capability. It would be nice if the problems of the USMC could be solved by adding two gold plated expensive airframes to their inventory, but it can’t. Right now the USMC is suffering about an $11 Billion shortfall on ground equipment used up in Iraq and Afghanistan that either needs refirb or direct replacement. That is the USMC figure. Congress says about $5-6 billion. So if congress is wrong, the USMC will still be short… well, you do the math. That is happening now, and what is sickly amusing is we have emergency war supplemental spending with things we don’t need, like C-17s above the number agreed on, porked in by congress, V-22s and a whole bunch of other things troops in the field aren’t asking for. Seems there is no payola from defense contractors to congressmen to refirb/replace ground equipment, or if there is, that criminal lobby is weak and slow and still could show up with a dramatic shortfall from what the Marines asked for. The Army btw is in the same boat with about $17 billion in broken/beat up ground equipment that needs replacement/refirb. No one in congress disputed that figure, they just haven’t done anything about it but footdrag. So if you are trying to tell me we need to sink billions into airframe that don’t bring much to the fight, I’d tell you your priorities are screwed up.
Add to that the USMC had to back track on large helo replacement, seems the V-22 can’t do everything, not to mention the delays it has encountered from the great unpleasantness of 2000-2001. New large helos for the USMC should have been fast tracked long ago. They are just now waking up to that mistake. You may want to accuse me of throwing out the baby with the bathwater re: Harrier. However, if ever there was a case of that, it would be with the topic of large helos and the USMC. Funny how the arrogance of man, …. or in this case the arrogance of the military industrial complex, wants to replace war proven items with insanely expensive bling bling aircraft. If it is overly expensive, it must be good, everyday, all the time.
As for Harrier, funny how the USMC did effective CAS for years before without one. We don’t have a novelty that never had a business plan in the airline industry anymore: Concorde. So should it be with Harrier. You might want to see how many of these we dumped in training and how much it didn’t bring to the fight, before you rally around it. It is funny how Marine air went from simple/reliable to excessive safety risk ( Harrier ) and now bleeding-edge crash-o-matic: ( V-22 ). Where Harrier is the most maintenance intensive aircraft in the USMC inventory. When a unit does well and exceeds a flying safety hour mark common in safer fixed wings, everyone trots out for a press release. “Look it’s safe”. :rolleyes:
As for it’s “combat record”. Funny how the vertical/stol landing has almost no benefit to the way we do business. When there are conventional airfields available we take them to use normal fixed wing aircraft. We are able to take them if that is our goal. Given everything the Harrier doesn’t bring to the fight, a modernized A-4 today would make it look silly. As for small aviation flatdecks for USMC, they are very useful. Although they compete for dollars and a ship building lobby that wants more blue water ships and expensive subs. Things we don’t need. Funny how that works. While I don’t like small carriers, an argument could be made for a small catapult flatdeck that would give a Marine amphib group, aviation capable of carrying 6-8 F-18F’s and some helos, to compliment what they have. The F-18F because it is two seat and building on the success of USMC F-18Ds. Fantasy? In this corrupt congress and mil industrial complex: Yes. A useful real USMC aviation asset? Yes.
Here with the small carrier for USMC you could have JSF also. However I would prefer that is a C JSF that carrys gas and payload. The weight concerns of the B model being able to lift much to carry to the fight are yet to be seen. Seeing as we don’t have much of a combat use for STOVL=waste of money better spent else where. The short field ability of this airframe just isn’t needed.
However, don’t worry. You will have your B JSF, and V-22. And USMC ground equipment being consumed in Iraq still won’t be replaced at a consistent rate. Great that we let the grunt continually use beat up gear to do the job. :rolleyes:
Combat Record
It would be one thing if the Harrier’s unique design had produced unique results. But in two wars and a number of lesser conflicts, the plane has not made a distinctive mark.
It is telling that Marine leaders, when defending the Harrier’s record, tend to point back two decades to another nation’s conflict.
In Britain’s Falkland Islands War with Argentina, Royal Navy Sea Harriers won a nation’s reverence by defending the short-deck ships on which they were based. Armed with cannons and heat-seeking missiles, they proved too much for Argentina’s Mirage fighters and other jets in air-to-air combat.
The Marine Corps’ Harriers have never faced a similar mission and are not outfitted to do so. The Marines obtained the plane primarily to support troops on the ground. As a result, the corps accepted many trade-offs for an aircraft that relies on powerful blasts of hot air to propel it into the sky.
The superheated column of thrust can liquefy asphalt, while its huge intakes can ingest pebbles and other engine-shredding debris.
The Harrier has to be light enough for the engine’s thrust to lift it straight off the ground, so it carries a relatively small amount of fuel, which limits both its range and payload. Its maximum external load, including bombs and fuel, is 9,000 pounds.
By contrast, the Marines’ own F/A-18 can handle 15,500 pounds and the Air Force’s A-10 up to 16,000 pounds, according to Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft.
To keep its weight down, the Harrier has no protective armor. It carries no flame-retardant foam in its fuel tanks because the foam displaces fuel. The fuel tanks are not equipped with self-sealing membranes to plug bullet or shrapnel holes.
The Marine Corps spent a lot of money to test such survivability systems in the late 1990s but ultimately rejected them because of their weight, said the Naval Air Systems Command, which oversees Marine aircraft safety.
Moreover, the plane’s single engine gives it little margin for error. It is neither supersonic nor stealthy, which means it cannot fly especially fast or easily elude enemy radar.
And the hottest of its thrust-producing nozzles are in the middle of the fuselage, a design anomaly required to balance the Harrier for vertical flight. In other aircraft, the hot spot is near the tail, where a hit by a heat-seeking missile is less likely to be fatal.
Until recently, the Harrier’s vulnerability was magnified because it was intended to fly close to the ground as it swooped down on enemy troops.
In its first significant U.S. combat role, during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, it paid a heavy price.
On the war’s final day, Capt. Reginald C. Underwood and other Harrier pilots were flying below the cloud cover at about 8,000 feet so they could see their target, a convoy of Iraqi military vehicles.
“We were flying way too low,” said his squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Fitzgerald. An Iraqi missile went straight up the left hot nozzle of Underwood’s jet. “He never saw it coming,” Fitzgerald said.
Underwood was killed, one of two Harrier pilots to die in Gulf War combat. Five of the seven Harriers that took enemy fire were destroyed. Two ejecting pilots were captured by the Iraqis.
The Harrier’s attrition rate of 1.5 planes for every 1,000 sorties flown contrasted with a rate of 0.5 for the A-10, a sturdy and inexpensive attack jet that flew many dangerous missions. The F-16 had an even lower rate, 0.2, and the Marine Corps’ F/A-18 suffered no losses.
Postwar Praise
The Marines nevertheless point to the Gulf War as the Harrier’s proving ground. The corps’ commandant at the time, Alfred M. Gray Jr., told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 1991 that its support for the AV-8B “paid off in spades” in the Gulf.
Marine officials and other Harrier proponents note that Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf, cited the Harrier in a postwar report as one of several weapons that gave “standout performances.”
The Harrier did fly early and often. But it required an enormous transport and supply operation to keep it provisioned with bombs, fuel, parts and distilled water for cooling the engine, a far cry from its originally stated mission of operating from remote locations.
It took about 2,000 Marines to support an air group based at King Abdul Aziz Air Base near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that included 66 Harriers and 20 OV-10 Bronco observation planes, said retired Col. John R. Bioty Jr., who commanded the group.
During the last 10 days of the war, some planes also operated from a short runway at Tanajib, a rearming and refueling base about 35 miles south of the Kuwaiti border that put them closer to the enemy than any other airplane.
The Harriers bombed Iraqi artillery, armored vehicles, troops and air defense units, Bioty said. And while other planes flew far more sorties, the smaller Harrier fleet flew a substantial number: 3,349.
“Because the aircraft was able to base closer to the forward edge of the battle area, it could respond quicker and didn’t require air refueling,” Bioty said. “It can do things other airplanes can’t do and can go places other airplanes can’t go.”
In the end, retired Air Force Gen. Charles A. Horner, the U.S. air commander in the Gulf, said his decision to stack aircraft over the battlefield “negated the need for quick response” from AV-8Bs.
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, omitted the plane from its 1997 report on the Gulf air war, pointing to its “relatively few strikes against strategic targets.”
Though the Harrier proved effective at what it did, “trying to justify it based on the Gulf War is tenuous at best,” Horner said. “In terms of payload, range and suitability for close air support,” he added, “the A-10 is a much better platform.”
Even some Marine generals agreed. Given the loss of five planes, the Harrier in the Gulf “wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t a great success,” said retired Lt. Gen. Charles H. Pitman, chief of Marine aviation from 1988 to 1990. “I don’t think they did anything spectacular.”
The Marines say they have since reduced the Harrier’s vulnerability by tripling the number of flares and other decoys that the plane can fire to divert missiles.
But the primary reason the plane is safer in war today is that the advancing technology of laser-guided missiles and bombs has allowed all combat planes to fly at higher altitudes. In the process, the Harrier has become less relevant.
“You can find missions the Harrier can perform,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, “but I question whether any of them are missions only the Harrier can perform.”
In future conflicts, unmanned drones like the one that killed suspected Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen last month are expected to fly missions that had been the exclusive province of combat planes like the Harrier.
And American commanders now routinely assign various aircraft to essentially loiter over the battlefield, reducing the value of basing planes up front near the troops.
Some critics even argue it is unwise to put planes so close to the enemy because it leaves them vulnerable to attack.
All of those factors conspired to make the Harrier a marginal player last year in Afghanistan, where highflying bombers and fighter planes inflicted considerable damage before the Harriers were even called into action.
“Close air support in Marine terms was not what was happening there,” said Col. Thomas D. Waldhauser, commanding officer of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which included the Harrier squadron aboard the Peleliu. “Close air support in Afghanistan was a B-52 dropping bombs from 30,000 feet.”
The six planes on the Peleliu were sent into combat only after their frustrated pilots complained to Commandant Jones about their idleness.
When the war began, the Harriers in the region lacked a laser targeting system. Lt. Gen. Michael A. Hough, chief of Marine aviation, said Harriers were cleared to join the war only after military leaders agreed that other aircraft with laser systems could pinpoint targets for the AV-8Bs. (The laser systems are now being installed in 98 Harriers at a cost of nearly $1.7 million each.)
“This is the sort of conflict in which Harrier proponents typically would expect to see the Harrier prominently used, especially early on,” said Christopher Bolkcom, a military aviation analyst for the Congressional Research Service. “I don’t think it’s lost on many people that the Harriers were not the first airplanes used in that war.”
By the time the Harriers entered the fray, targets were scarce. In November and December, the busiest months for the Harrier, the aircraft dropped only 161 bombs during 342 sorties. The 400 allied aircraft in Afghanistan never included more than 12 Harriers. Until Dec. 31, the Harriers flew exclusively from ships, just like safer and more effective Navy and Marine planes.
On that day, after the fall of Kandahar, the Marines dispatched two Harriers to a partly destroyed airstrip there. Marine leaders touted this as evidence that the planes were operating where others could not.
But the two planes stayed only one night, flying four sorties and dropping no bombs, according to the Marines.
Capt. Chris Raible, who piloted Harriers in Afghanistan, said the flights “were like photo ops.”
When medals were awarded for Operation Anaconda, the major battle in eastern Afghanistan in March, the honors went to the Marine helicopter pilots who provided low-level fire for ground troops while the Harriers circled above.
Harriers have been operating alongside A-10s at a high-altitude air base at Bagram since October, where the Marines say they have provided “essential support to ground units.” But the thin air and a torn-up runway have restricted vertical flight.
In two important respects, the Harrier performed impressively: reliability and bombing accuracy. Pilots said the plane held up remarkably during extended sorties and that their bombs almost always hit their mark.
Gen. Jones said the Harriers “acquitted themselves quite well” in Afghanistan. “They’ve proven themselves to be very worthy contributors.”
But a number of military officials and analysts question the value of the Harrier’s contribution.
“I think the reason the AV-8s were used at all in Afghanistan was a tendency by the U.S. military to give everybody their turn, whether you needed them or not,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The AV-8B simply wasn’t competitive in terms of range, payload, survivability, target acquisition [or] communications capability.”
The Marines acquired the Harrier for a different type of war than is fought today, said Daniel Goure, a former director of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Competitiveness and now vice president of the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va.
“For that reason, they took all the attendant risk of mishap rates and all the rest,” he said. “In hindsight, I suspect they would have come up with a different answer.”
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