Without f15c d a big capability gap will open up, possibly the biggest gap of them all.
Really? Do you need them for air policing in the US? And could the US afford a war in which the F-16s and F-22 won´t be enough in the next 3 decades?
Sad to see them go but there’s truth in it.
USA has to ask it self: “what is it that we want our military to do and what assets do we need to accomplish this?”
In fact I think the question is, how much military can we still afford and then what can be done with it?
It comes down to what kind of wars the US will likely fight in the future. I think it’s pretty obvious the kind of large scale COIN war we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan are unlikely to occure in the future simply because it would be madness for any American President to fight a major land war. There’s no political will for it. Without huge numbers of boots on the ground, you don’t need the A-10 to protect them. Whether we’re talking about Iran or North Korea scenarios, the B-1B would be more useful than the A-10. If forced to chose between them, the A-10 will have to go.
As said above, the US does not ask itself which wars it will be fighting, but which wars it still can afford to fight. It is the experience from Vietnam all over again. Fighting a war while keeping the states budget and taxes in peace time mode will kill oyur budget. the good thing is that today there is no Cold War going, so the US can afford to reduce the armed forces much more. The US has reached a point, where hanging on to old planes and equipment to avoid a capability gap, will just create a bigger gap in the future, as there no money to keep the old stuff in service and introduce the new equipment. Every F-15 flight hour costs 36.000$ a F-16C roughly half. This means you can keep 2 F-16 for one F-15C. Or One F-16 + 16.000$ for new planes. Going by a 180 planes fleet and 1000 hours per year for each plane. This is 2.880.000.000 if you just fly an F-16 instead of an F-15.
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