WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (UPI) -- Air Force generals and air marshals have often despised or underrated the importance of tactical support of ground troops. The assumption that the new F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter can carry out this role in addition to its air combat superiority and fighter-bomber missions may prove to be a striking example of this old, stubborn mindset.
In his classic work "Normandy," the British military historian Max Hastings credits only two senior Allied air force generals, one British and one American, with appreciating the crucial importance of close tactical ground support for the armies fighting their way inland from the D-Day beachheads. The two generals in question were Air Vice Marshal Harry Broadhurst of the British Royal Air Force and Gen. Elwood "Pete" Quesada of the U.S. Army Air Force.
But the problem of tactical ground support is not merely the reluctance of senior air commanders to switch aircraft from their beloved strategic bombing and winning air superiority missions to the dirty, messy and unglamorous business of ground support. It is also their reluctance to approve mass production of the kind of specialized aircraft that the role needs.
The finest Anglo-American ground support aircraft of World War II was developed as the result of serendipitous failures. As we have noted in previous columns, the much touted British Hawker Typhoon proved disappointingly unmanuverable -- and a brick to fly -- in its intended air superiority role, but it proved unparalleled as a massively armed, fast and robust ground-support weapon.
The king of all tactical ground-support aircraft, however, was the legendary Soviet Il-3 Sturmovik, and it taught the lesson of specialization extremely well. It was very slow -- well under 300 mph, even at the end of the war. And it didn't look that great either. But it was massively armed and impressively armored on its underbelly. More than 35,000 of them were built.
Whatever else it was, the Sturmovik was no fighter and early versions of it suffered heavy casualties as a result. The Luftwaffe's Junkers Ju-87 Stuka -- a high-precision dive bomber without peer, was equally vulnerable to airborne hunters without its own protective air cover. But the designers of the Sturmovik and the Stuka knew that land armies, especially armored columns engaging in blitzkrieg-type offensive operations, needed closely coordinated tactical air support that only specialized aircraft bred for the job could provide.
The U.S. Air Force was forced into this realization kicking and screaming after the Vietnam War, where the Army's helicopter gunships were shot down in the hundreds. The Red Army had a similar experience later in Afghanistan. The answer was the most impressive modern successor to the Sturmovik, the great Fairchild-Republic A10 Thunderbolt, or Warthog, that proved so impressive during the 1991 Gulf War and in many other operations.
But the Air Force never had any love for the A10, and just looking at it explains why. The A10 is slow moving, ugly and ungainly. Flying it is like riding to war on a tough old carthorse rather than on a prancing thoroughbred stallion.
Now, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is being designed to supersede the A10 in its tactical ground-support role. But as analysts Elise Szabo and Winslow Wheeler pointed out in UPI columns published last week, there are significant problems that are already apparent with this scenario.
For even if the F-35 performs according to its promised parameters -- and that is still by no means guaranteed -- it has not been designed for the dangerous, difficult and complex ground superiority mission. The armaments it will carry are conventional air-to-air weapons. It will not carry the A10's formidable GAU-8 cannon. It cannot carry the armored protection of the A10 either and therefore will be much more vulnerable even to ground-directed small-arms fire. And as Szabo and Wheeler pointed out, the F-35 is just going to be too fast to accurately target the ground forces and dug-in fortifications it will have to hit in its tactical support role.
Tactical ground support was a central element of the German Blitzkrieg and of the Red Army's unparalleled armored offensive operations from Stalingrad to Berlin. The Battle of Normandy could not have been won without it. It was essential to the U.S. walk-in-the-park desert victory of the first Gulf war in 1991. Delegating the role to an aircraft built primarily to fulfill other missions and that therefore lacks the essential elements such specialized role planes need does not augur well for the future.
