Cities have become the new battleground and Hybrid or Urban Warfare the greatest threat being waged by ISIS to Boko Haram to Hamas to Ukraine rebels. New air, ground and sea based platforms and munitions are desired having capabilities of accurately engaging targets in urban terrain with low collateral damage. The US military has been interested in light attack capabilities for special forces. The US Air Force (USAF) has released a draft request for proposal (RFP) for the light attack aircraft programme. US Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said: “We must develop the capacity to combat violent extremism at lower cost.
Buying several hundred light attack aircraft would also bring with it several other advantages, proponents of the strategy argued. A very economical fighter aircraft that has a multi-mission capability, that can fly in permissive environments would take the load off of the fourth-generation and the fifth-generation fighters, and not use up their service life in missions that don’t require all that capability .
Further, there is the fighter pilot shortage, which requires not only cockpits to train fighter pilots, but cockpits to season them. And seasoning in fourth and fifth generation aircraft is phenomenally more expensive than in an OA-X. Having more light aircraft in its inventory would increase its capacity, allowing it to train more pilots per year.
In addition, buying a low-cost, easy-to-use plane would also “bolster our interoperability,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein said in a statement. This in turn would give the service an opportunity to partner with international countries who might not be able to afford a more pricey jet like the F-35 or F-15.
The Air Force announced in 2016 that it was considering holding a flight demo with light attack planes the following year. The aim was determine if such an aircraft would be useful to perform missions over permissive airspace in place of much more expensive and capable fourth and fifth-generation fighters. That may point to the efficacy of light attack aircraft in theaters like Afghanistan, where insurgent groups have little surface-to-air capability.
The Air Force was expected to test four different aircraft types including Sierra Nevada’s A-29 Super Tucano, the Hawker Beechcraft AT-6, the Textron Scorpion Jet and the Air Tractor AT-802U during its experiment. The hope, Air Combat Command head Gen. Mike Holmes told Defense News then, was to better understand whether inexpensive, off-the-shelf aircraft could fill some of the service’s close-air support requirements in the Middle East at a cheaper operating cost than combat aircraft like the A-10 or F-16.
Now Airforce has cancelled earlier experiment and announced new experiments, planned for May to July 2018 at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, narrow the field to Textron Aviation’s AT-6 Wolverine and the A-29 Super Tucano made by Sierra Nevada Corporation and Embraer — cutting the Textron Scorpion and L-3 Technologies’ AT-802L Longsword from further competition.
The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) has added $1.2 billion to the fiscal year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the U.S. Air Force’s OA-X light attack/observation aircraft effort.
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