I’ve been reading the discussion about Brian’s post on a possible USAF suborbital spaceplane project. It seems to me much of the discussion is overblown and ungrounded in reality. This is the expected next generation of military aircraft. An acquaintance of mine, Mitchell Burnside Clapp, championed a military space plane project named “Black Horse” a decade ago when he was a USAF officer. I have some of his papers on my islandone web site. Mitchell has been involved with commercial space ventures since he left the military.
This is not an ICBM or an ICBM derivative we are talking about. That is a non-starter for practical vehicles, whether for the warfighter or the commuter. It will be an aeroplane with a rocket engine. If it is a descendant of Mitchell’s design studies it will use in-flight refueling to top off the tanks. This reduces the weight of landing gear. They will only need to support a partially fueled craft. Once such a craft drops away from the tanker, it lights up and goes suborbital. It is not that much different operationally from the SR-71, it just goes a bit faster and higher.
Perhaps the USAF will buy from some of my other friends. There are some in the Mojave desert who would be more than happy to scale up to their suborbital design (XCOR). Brian has indicated this is a DARPA initiative, so contracts to companies like XCOR are a very real possibility. DARPA likes small groups with new ideas and has very little red tape or strings attached to their funding. I know. I’ve worked on DARPA projects myself.
This could be the real start of the commercial space launch industry. Greg Maryniak of the X-Prize organization has at various time spoken on this point. The early days of aviation were done privately and their products were then purchased by government. So airplanes are, in the minds of the person on the street, a commercial product. Rockets were built by and for government projects. Apollo made space travel a “government product” in the common mind. It was a false start and it has delayed space travel by decades. It sent us down a dead end road of manned artillery rockets and giant white winged elephants.
We are about to see a total conceptual change. People like those at X-Prize are changing the mind set. There are a dozen or more small companies building suborbital aerospace planes and ships. At least one (Rutan) will fly by the end of the year (target is mid-December on Wright Brothers first flight anniversary); several more will probably fly in the following 2 years. We are about to go back in time and start the space program over. This time we’ll do it the way the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss and others did it. Privately but with the odd military or mail contract to keep body and soul together.
Suborbital aircraft are no revolution in aerial warfare. They bring no completely new capability to the USAF. It is advantageous to the aircrews. I am sure they will very much appreciate flight times of 1.5 hours instead of fourteen and up. As to those on the recieving end… I don’t much think they care what time the bomber took off and how long it flew before sending them off to Valhalla.
Where it may well be revolutionary is in US basing policy. It won’t change things over night. In a couple decades closure of US overseas air bases may be a viable policy option. That’s a salutory effect from where I sit.
We already are seeing the start of a retrenchment of US global forces. I suggested this outcome some months ago. We are moving large numbers of our forces out of Europe; we have moved out of Saudi Arabia; US troops are being pulled back from the truce line in North Korea. I can’t see us maintaining a high profile in Turkey any more. Even worse than being unreliable, they have had been working to assasinate leaders and destabilize the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Turkish black ops guys on such missions have been captured by US forces at least twice. We will be stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time, but it will not be comparable to the fifty year deployments in Germany and South Korea.
You may argue whether the US government intends this trajectory. Nonetheless, we are on it. The time will come when we can force a return to a “Fortress America” defense posture. There is no other possible path that will make it politically feasible for us to militarily disengage from the world. If we can defend ourselves against any attacker from anywhere on the globe and do so quickly from our own shores, we can satisfy worries of the most paranoid Hawk.
At the same time we will decrease our target profile amongst the nutcases of the world.
If you want to achieve zero foreign bases, there’s one big piece of the puzzle still missing: rapid intercontinental deployment of ground troops and ground equipment.
Think big military cargo planes at suborbital speed. Huge numbers of them. Try to imagine how many cargo planes we’d have needed to invade Iraq if we hadn’t deployed anything in Kuwait first.
This all makes interesting reading. I suspect that in line with this there’ll be announcement about the “Aurora” the much discussed and never seen, or official accepted, replacement for the SR-71.
It would nicer if this was manned but we can’t have everything. The rumours concerning hypersonic drones have been around for a while now.
For those who are interested in bidding, (and I know you are readers) the solicitation ishere.
I’ve heard talk of a potential solution for moving large amounts of troops and equipment to a conflict via a new generation “airship”. Whether the idea flies (or has flown as some black watchers claim) is beyond my ability to predict.
And of course you will need to negotiate for forward basing if you have to bring in large numbers of troops and heavy armour for a real war. The US didn’t start WWII with forward bases here in the UK either. You can’t have such bases everywhere for all time. If there is a threat to a neighborhood, you’ll get bases. Otherwise you won’t. And that’s probably good.
I can’t remember the spelling but they are called “Erkanoplans” – they are like a cross between a flying boat and a hovercraft.
The Russians designed several which could fly a few metres above the sea at many hundreds of miles an hour.
BBC2’s Horizon programme did one called “The Black Sea Monster” – that should get a hit on google.
Actually I’d not even thought of them. I was thinking of the claimed US black project. Supposedly there has been working on a very large rigid airship lifting body design using modern materials and jet engines for power. Very long range, very high lift capacity, very low operational costs.
As far as projecting troops into a conflict- One big caveat: You need the ability to retrieve them, for their sake or even just for redeployment and flexibility. Either that or have disposable (remote controlled robotic?) troops.
The main virtue of airmobile tactics (helicopter borne) over airborne or glider troops is the ability to retrieve. Paratroop operations have always had to be (relatively) small affairs because of this limitation.
As an historical aside, I have always wondered what would have happened in WWI if the Germans had used their zeppelins as airmobile carriers and landed troops in the rear of the Western Front.
One other thought: As far as projection of national power is concerned, I would think recent experiences in Afganistan and Iraq would have made the necessity of ground troops unarguable. It is great to have convenient proxys if they are available as in Afganistan, but without them you must supply your own.
Because this has a very fast reaction time as its main attraction, it appears to preclude the need for troops. That may be a feasible option to a hardcore proponent of air power – (I recall Senator Goldwater thought we could win the Vietnam conflict entirely from the air. In fact what may have been the critical logistical artery of the early war, the Ho Chi Minh trail, was ineffectively interdicted by air power. That failure never apparently was thought significant enough to remedy. After all, air power always works, doesn’t it?)
To one without that touching faith in the sufficiency of aerial bombardment, this is less a panacea and more a higher tech version of Clinton’s cruise missiles. In that sense it will not even lower our nutcase profile.
And if a fast reaction time is all we want, why don’t we just find a way to quickly retarget our ICBM’s and drop a small nuclear device. After all, from the receiving end one megaton is much like any other. Of course, there might be some advantage to taking a little time to think things through, but then what good is a fast reaction time?
However as a way to restart the space program into a more fertile path it is, as Dale writes, very cool and well worth the cost of admission – perhaps even worth it if it does end up pissing off a few more Islamic nuts and Frenchmen. It is a much better rathole than most for our tax dollars
Quote: Dave O’Neill
“I can’t remember the spelling but they are called “Erkanoplans” – they are like a cross between a flying boat and a hovercraft.”
We call them “Wing In Ground-effect” (WIG) craft, just so you know 🙂
Ground Effect?
Who invented them in the first place eh? 😉
I don’t think there was any implication that real war does not require ground troops, only that troops need not be permanently based outside of the US. This was the case for Afghanistan and Iraq. We negotiated or invented solutions in the area when needed. Troops are moved by aircraft and in larger numbers by troop ship, the same way armies have been brought to battle for centuries. Carriers supply a large part of the air cover today; large capacity bombers fly intercontinental distances to deliver their punch. We’re already a very large part of the way towards a military based at home.
The US was classically a maritime power. Over the course of the 20th century that was extended to include the air. We’ll continue to need regional port facilities for some time; we may need regional airbases for a considerable time as well.
The aerospace plane simply puts us on a road that eliminates the peace time need for foreign basing while retaining the capability to retaliate quickly against attackers.
I’m afraid I may have been too erratic in my comments – this is a subject that sends the mind into a lot of different speculations!
The main point that I meant to make was that troop retrievability is essential to effective force projection. You can certainly move troops into an area by plane, by ship, by parachute, even by donky cart over time. But can you get them out again if you have to – under fire? This new idea can get troops in but not out.
Bases are only a partial solution to this problem. Arnhem was a base, after all. So were Pusan and Normandy. If you can hold them, fine. Great Britain, that unsinkable aircraft carrier, was a vastly superior ‘base’.
Sinkable aircraft carriers are an order of magnitude poorer. I suspect large troop carrying hovercraft are poorer still. Their main disadvantage is that they can only work around a coast. Napoleon was not defeated by the British Navy but by Wellington fighting inland.
With this strategic vision, the US can certainly prevail against small, state supported terrorist groups and against coastal states. Against an enemy such as communist China, it is of questionable value. For example, suppose the Chinese, overburdened with a massive number of 18-25 year old unemployed males as a result of their anti-female abortion policies, decide -perhaps correctly- that the US is one day stretched too thin and would not in any case be willing to go to war in the defense of communist Vietnam. India, the only other power with a dog in that fight, could be sidelined next time Pakistan becomes antagonistic. An obvious solution to their demographic problem is to employ the excess males as infantrymen, send them south with the promise that they can have the women and wait for the US to do what? Send spaceplanes? Yet without allies in the area -not bases, nor aircraft carriers, but allies – there is little that we could do to stop what would be a very bad shift in the balance of power.
To the extent this gadget makes us think we can be Fortress America, it will be a disaster. We might get by with a greatly enlarged CIA, with an expanded portfolio. But that is unlikely to happen as the result of an isolationistic turn. It would also be a negative for liberty, both of America and the rest of the world.
Perhaps that is part of the point. I much prefer we don’t get involved in such fights. India v Pakistan might be sad, but it is not our affair. India would ultimately win by shear numbers if nought else. Neither would I much care about China v Vietnam about which we could or would do FA in any case. I might care about China v Japan but that’s an over-water invasion and they are not a naval power.
We really have to narrow our interests to those matters which directly and violently impinge on Americans in America. Don’t take it that because I have supported these two campaigns that I automatically support the US getting involved everywhere. Hell, I’m not sure I even care to get involved in Liberia. If it actually requires a fight, I’d say definitely not. What happens there does not put American cities at risk and so is not my concern. On a humanitarian level it’s just a garden variety crisis, not a decades long institutionalized barbarism. So I’ve a difficult time answering the “why?” question.
As to the question of evacuating troops… there is no particularly good answer. Never has been. Orderly retreat is the best you can hope for; if you’ve nowhere to retreat to forces surrender; sometimes portions of armies are rescued as in Dunkirk. There was a pretty nasty trap in the Korean War involving US soldiers.
If the Iraqi Army had been grievously underestimated and had cut off and encircled our troops, we could not have pulled them out other than reinforcments breaking through the lines.
So I don’t see any tactical change in the worlds of yesterday, today and tomorrow on this issue.
Dale-
There are two potential threads – tactical changes and isolationism vs. engagement – threatening to start with your last post. I’m tempted to follow both but I will resist, stick with the tactical change and let someone else be guilty of taking this off topic.
The significance of the spaceplane idea, it seems to me, is twofold. The good significance is, as you pointed out, the opportunity to restart the space program properly. Short of having a real global disarmament program by collecting the world’s H bombs and using them for a real Freeman Dyson spaceship, this opportunity is probably as good as it is going to get.
The bad significance is that it is tempting to think it offers an innovative tactical change. That change is exactly what is being discussed: the ability to project power beyond the US border without having to have logistics beyond that same border. We circle the wagons and shoot the Indians.
We were able to act in both Afganistan and Iraq because we had at least a few allies who were willing to help us. Turkey, Bahrain, Quatar, probably some others who prefer to remain anonymous. Without them I seriously doubt that we would have been able to set up our ad hoc logistical arrangements. Those alliances didn’t happen overnight and were pitifully sparse as it was. I mean to avoid going off on the isolationism/engagement sidetrack, but I have to mention that if you are convinced that what happens between say China and VietNam is none of our business and won’t affect us now or in the future, then all we probably need is the ability to shoot the occasional redskin. I happen to think that is not nearly enough. I realize that is conflicting with ideas of an open rational society, but I have to leave those excellent ideals behind when the guns come out. Then the calculus is unfortunately one of force and coercion.
And you are right to say that in the matter of evacuating troops (under fire) there is no good answer and never has been. That is why a commander worrys constantly about his lines of communication. There is no good answer so you just don’t let yourself get into that situation. And I am worried that this neat gadget will tempt us to get into precisely that situation.
You notice that this is an Air Force program. You can bet the Army is not thrilled. If it ever comes to life, I’ve no doubt that the Army will salute, say yes sir and climb aboard. I just wonder how many will come back.
Also, to keep things clarified, there are two programs under discussion. One is in the white world under DARPA and is a hypersonic bomber code named Falcon; the other is an unproven, large and slow black aircraft with a number of claimed sightings which I take with a very interested grain of salt. The large black aircraft/airship is hypothesized to be a transport to serve the same purpose as a troop ship. Tactically it would have delivered troops to Kuwait. Nowhere have I suggested direct delivery of all troops to the battlefield, although I have thought of that possiblity.
Just for argument… if you have air superiority and can move thousands of tons of supplies by air, then perhaps you could have a fully aerial logistical chain. This would have some rather interesting impacts on campaign strategies.
I should also comment on the particular scenario you mentioned, China v Vietnam. They did go to war in the last 30 years and we stayed disinvolved. Additionally even if the US were the most hawkish society imaginable, there is still FA we could do. China could field an army larger than our entire population if it felt it necessary. A serious Asian land conflict with them would, as MacArthur realized and got fired for, require nukes. I don’t think we want to go there.
I really think it would be a good idea to be friends with them.