Objective and Threshold performance requirements have existed in most if not all RFP’s of this magnitude. BBP just provides an avenue to provide monetary incentives to industry teams that offer performance closer to the objective than the threshold in order to reverse the trend of competition forcing teams to choose threshold targets in order to beat the other side on cost. Even within this its not a blank check to just go on and shoot for the moon. Cost (as would be determined through the ICE) would also have an acceptable range within which they could choose a combination where the winning design comes in at an acceptable higher cost (defined within the scope of the RFP) with accompanied ‘desired’ higher performance. Similarly, the performance offered by one design may come in at an unacceptable cost and therefore may provide no real advantage to the particular design team chasing it.

If one wants to complain of rigged technical requirements then one must make a technical case for such but preempting one, 4 months before the final RFP is released sounds rather absurd. As things stand Textron is the only company that has backed out citing high performance requirements making it cost-prohibitive for them to chase this with the Scorpion. Within the remaining pool of domestic and foreign-partner based submissions you can have multiple scenarios and its entirely possible for one bid to be at the threshold but offer great value on account of significantly lower cost or the reverse could hold true i.e. a competitor meets the objective requirements (or even exceeds them) with only a marginal higher cost. The new policy recognizes and rewards you for better performance within the threshold-objective range, it doesn’t automatically mean that you can clinch the competition by just doing that.

What you say sometime relives me into a small hope of someone recovering almot a part of sanity, so now instead of talking about rigging i’ll just talk about putting forth pourposely taylored requisites to favour some of the contenders and to avoid the risk of LoMart to get a virtual monopoly over the US defence procurement…
Because, you know, what you just said is further comfirming my own suspects: if they would have really chosen the highest possible performances regardless to the price to pay they could have decided for the T-50, if they would have preferred to have a great lead-in trainer, capable to give them all the needed syllabus at the right price, they would have chosen the T-100.
They instead have chosen to pourposely search for something blurry, whose utility is difficult to even imagine but that would not be covered by both the above mentioned planes.

In every case, i’ll reply there also to what you said earlier about the CAS plane as a way of influencing the T-x competition. Obviously, it’s just the right contrary : it is the CAS/COIN/FAC plane that have to be derived by the Lead-in trainer that will be chosen, not the other way round.
M-346FT is something that italians have made for broadening and implementing our own offer to the whole world market, not for a single, even if way the largest, possible future customer.

Certainly i would be happy if it would find a space as an almost partial substitute of AMX or also of the A-10 but almost in this last case it would mean to take over a part of the F-35 order, something that would ossibly impact its already very high price.
That’s about the other leg of my initial consideration about living in a normal word…

Its quite simple – Think of the number of targets, number of aircraft, number of tankers, number of air-bases, number of maintainers, number and cost of munitions and manpower required to sustain all that and then you can get an idea about how moving up to number of munitions per target effects your cost equation. Its just not the cost of the munitions itself but getting the enterprise to deliver that munitions and create the desired level of effect. Each COCOM has a level of demand from each unique air-force, Navy and Army enterprise..If you move up the number of munitions required per target, you impact the number of aircrafts demanded by the COCOM’s for a desired number of targets or missions. This in turn effects the COCOM need for tanker and puts additional stress on the tanker fleet. All in if you want to fight like that you have to stock yourself accordingly. Your main cost drivers are manpower, and hardware sustainment so those decisions absolutely come with consequences.

Despite the relatively large Anti-ISIL operation (US) in terms of amount of munitions used, or sorties flown the PGM cost is only about 20% of the overall cost.

What are you describing here is something that can be referred to a campaign of strategical bombing of a country industrial and mobility infrastructure, nothing to di with a CAS mission and above all with the fight to ISIS.
Let’s just consider the very first one thing you mention in your post i.e. the number of targets and anything falls apart immediately.
From what I read you seem consider them as a fixed or anyway a quite predictable amount that you can determine beforehandedly: industries, railway stations, barracks, command centers and so on, like it was with Germany or North Vietnam.
In Syria -Iraq it is not at all like so: you are there facing insurgent forces with not any need of a infrastructure to substain themselves,made up by a collection of small, autonomous armed groups with not a well defined chain of command, all used to scatter themselves to the extreme, to lodge in civilian houses and sustain themselves at the expense of the population of the territories they pretend to have liberated.
After just some weeks Intl coalition mission rate fell down radically as the initial, small list of fixed targets went quickly depleted and there were not any way to replenship it with more to just an handful of new ones.
Isis reactedto it dispersing their own units even more: their company sized “regular” formation were scattered down into platoons and so on.
At the beginning of the russian operation I gave a look to the CENTCOM bullettin reporting the daily flow of mission and the comparison between them and the russian one, both by the numbers than the quality of target engaged was just comical. Even the great deal off recoinnossance assets they used (and the most of them are still manned ones, not drones, just to disappoint even more the high tech junkies there) was simply not enough to get more than an handful of targets a day.
That’s because the coalition was just keeping on with the strategical bombing approach you are describing here while the RuAf, like before them the SyaAf and the IqAf acted in direct support of their “own” ground forces.
In such a way, targets are constantly generated by the same ground forces actions that force the insurgent to group on and come in the open not to be overunned intead to just staying concealed/dispersed while still controlling the territory and its resources.

Ok, that’s just for the first six words of your intervention: would we talk also of the costs of the reconnoissance assets and the tankers needed to perform strategical bombing missions using fighters?

Thank to you all for keeping the thread alive.
And sorry I was out of reach some day , so I’ll try a multiquote to keep it up.

Use of PGMs is one factor to improving the effectiveness of CAS. Another is pushing the ability to target down to the squad level.

Currently the JTAC carries a bulky kit used for targeting and passing target data to the CAS asset. But CAS is only effective where the JTAC is, and JTACs are not everywhere. A solution would be to provide a miniaturized version of the JTAC kit to the infantry squad so they can call CAS based on their needs. But that requires Army leadership to get off their duffs and demand targeting capability at the squad level. That same squad should possess backpack UAVs for reconnaissance to answer the question “Are there insurgents planning an ambush in an alley six blocks from here?” Again Army leadership is lacking when a requirements pull is needed.

Well, problem with TAC is that it is anyway a very complicated process requiring specially trained personnel, way superior than the one used to call for artillery strikes. It os something made usually by air force personnel itself or by SF personnel not by a squad or ever a platoon commander.

No, the remaining rounds is no miss! Each bullet not hitting target will be noticed by boots on the ground, so they will find cover! And as long as you hear the A10 gun occatinally, you will try to be in hiding. You just dont get the same effect from bombs and rockets.

It is EXACTLY what our Air Force has learned (or better get an healthy refresh about ) the hard way throught the above cited five day battle. I would not put it using those world you used but the psicological impact of having something orbiting over your heads and ready to intervene as soon as you move from your position was something that effectively surprised the same Aereounatica personnel involved in the operation.
Obviouslty it is not an effect that you can get using gun only, also bombs, rocket, guided missile would get a similar one, it is more about knowing to have a menace costantly over your head to get the trick done.
Let’s say that the gun (any one not just thy GAU-8) is the one that has the maximum squatting effect at the lesser cost in term of aereodinamicity and can be used for greater number of times (or also just feigning a strafing run).

And what about something derived from the Army future airlift program? With tilt rotors and 400kt speed, the boundary b/w aircraft and rotorcraft is definitely blurred.
You’ll impart no extra cost (and actually provide some extra saving with scale effects), will gain on mobility and deployment and could fill a niche transverse to all services (Navy, Marines and Air force in addidtion to the army).

Oh nooooo, did I mention a Joint program!?…*

My though exactly, abov alla because it would solve also the real CAS problem, almost in the west: Asset of air force, benefits for Army.

Don’t worry Marcello. Non preoccuparti.
When costing for the development of the new trainers for the US starts putting the squeeze on their other ‘wish list’ programs, they may reconsider an existing proven solution.
What do you think will see downscaling, the new bomber development, or the most advanced new trainer in the world .

But the m-346 still needs crew armor and a bigger gun for the CAS mission.
ISIS does have armored vehicles, not just Toyota pick-up trucks, and if friendlies are under fire, air support needs to be able to ‘open up’ those vehicles, even when they have run out of missiles nd bombs.

I’m not saying that Aermacchi would not compete anymore, just that they would not made specific investment in order to match this specific requirement, in our opinion pourposely arranged just to hamper T-100 chanche to win tender.
It would not have sense to radically improve this aspect only, with the result of making it less economically convenient or less reliable it actually is.
In case the tender would be an open end one, its actual advantages over the other would be enought anyway, if it is as we think it is even actully winning the tender would make us actually sell it, exactly as it happened with the Marine Force One and the C-27j for the Army cases.

The “gun is essential” view of CAS is an archaic throwback to the time when biplanes ruled the skies over the trenches during WWI – spraying projectiles across the countryside (most missing their targets). The A-10 carries 1350 rounds and might kill 5 targets. The remaining 1345 rounds miss!

How about a modern view where the CAS asset uses its sensors to ID targets and program a target-specific number of tiny “killer bee” PGMs, which seek out and destroy their assigned targets?
If the “killer bee” loadout weighs the same 1800+kg as the A-10’s GAU-8, and an individual “killer bee” weighs 1 kg, and has a 50% hit rate, then the modern CAS asset can kill 900 targets. That is an 18,000% improvement over the A-10!

My point is to stop re-fighting the last war using archaic technology. M346 as CAS is a losing proposition.

Well, you have to forgive us about this.
As you know we are an archaic people: when your own ancestors still lived in an hut in some part of Saxony we had had Caesar, Vergilius and Augustus by a long time, so we maybe tend to be quite conservative in certain matters.

Still we just have a CAS plane in our inventory, a quite unconventional one: no big gun, no great armor but also with such shortcomings and despite a certain initial underextimation of it, we now regard it as a fundamental asset, of our air force also because they had the possibility to test on field how also the ridicolous peashooter it had was a really useful tool, above all to make talibans squat down instead of overrunning the position of those US marines that were stuck down in a bog with their during what we call “the five day battle” (august 2012) i.e.how long it took to rescue them.

So, given that such PGM you descrive are still in the head of God, as we use to say, i’m happy to inform you that the most appreciated item, both by pilots than by the, always forgotten when talking about CAS, grunt on ground, of our AMX was precisely the RECCELLITE pod thanks to the ability it had to not only gather but also to distribute in real time the information to the troops on field, something that saved several lives in AFganistan, just by preventing ambushes and that is was anyway followed in this by the LITENING one to guide PGM bombs.
So no one there is advocating to employ only the gun (and above all to install a A-10 like monster on a modern plane) on such a mission, only trying to made undestand to you and other like minded people that the Close Air SUPPORT mission is, almost in our own’s archaic people air force vision, something just an universe or two more complicated that a mere body count.