A brand new plane that may fly reconnaissance missions and bomb enemy forces is vital to U.S. particular forces’ future in Africa, the pinnacle of Air Drive Particular Operations Command stated Tuesday.
Lt. Gen. James Slife spoke because the Biden administration critiques the U.S. army’s international footprint and prepares to advise Congress on reorienting American forces for future conflicts.
“I might counsel to you that if we wish to preserve strain on these violent extremist organizations that pose a risk to the USA — that pose a risk to the homeland — we might have to stay engaged in parts of Africa towards very particular threats and never simply broadly, wherever the place there’s an extremist, however particularly the place those who pose an exterior risk are,” Slife stated Tuesday throughout a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Research Zoom occasion.
Known as Armed Overwatch, the brand new planes are the Air Drive’s newest try and subject counterinsurgency plane which can be cheaper to fly than high-performance fighter jets. However lawmakers aren’t offered on the challenge; they’ve minimize thousands and thousands of {dollars} that will have allowed the Air Drive to start out shopping for planes this yr.
“In the end, I imagine that SOCOM will have the ability to show to the Congress that it is a viable program, and it is required for the long run working setting,” Slife stated.
U.S. Particular Operations Command plans to conduct flight demonstrations of “a handful of plane” within the coming months. The outcomes of these trials will decide the trail forward, however the basic stated he hopes to “be in a procurement” of a business plane that doesn’t require a prolonged improvement in fiscal 2022.
“I believe we will do this at comparatively low danger based mostly on what we have seen from the distributors who’ve indicated that they intend to deliver platforms to show for us within the coming months,” he stated.
The brand new armed aircraft is envisioned to interchange an growing older fleet of unarmed U-28 reconnaissance planes. U.S. Particular Operations command is planning to carry an indication of commercially accessible planes that could possibly be used for the missions “within the coming months,” Slife stated.
“We have to get by way of this demo to see what business can produce at low danger in a brief order,” he stated.
Air Drive Particular Operations Command flies unarmed U-28s, militarized Pilatus PC-12s, and MC-12Ws, militarized Beechcraft King Air 350s for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. It additionally flies armed MQ-9 Reaper drones. Particular ops leaders are planning to retire the U-28 when the brand new Armed Overwatch plane arrives.
For years, the Air Drive has thought-about shopping for a fleet of propeller-driven light-attack planes, however by no means moved previous the demonstration section. The newest effort is completely different, Slife stated.
“This isn’t a rehash of the Air Drive light-attack program,” he stated. “SOCOM envisions this as extra of a multi-role platform that may carry out degree supply of precision munitions.”
The overall stated the planes will not be prone to have ejection seats, like these included in dearer assault plane.
“If we’re making an attempt to fly airplanes that require ejection seats, we’re most likely centered on the mistaken factor because the Air Drive element of SOCOM,” Slife stated.
His feedback would appear to exclude the Sierra Nevada/Embraer Tremendous Tucano, Beechcraft AT-6B, Textron/AirLand Scorpion and Leidos/Paramount Bronco II, that are all thought-about light-attack planes and all have ejection seats. That would depart planes just like the Air Tractor AT-802U or Cessna AC-208 Armed Caravan as choices. The Iraqi Air Drive flies single-engine Cessna Caravans armed with Hellfire missiles.
In the course of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighters, bombers, digital assault plane, intelligence planes and refueling tankers would fly over a goal in a “stack” over each other between 10,000 and 25,000 ft. This “shouldn’t be viable for the long run [and] it is not cost-effective” for combating violent extremist organizations, Slife stated.
“We have to collapse the stack…right into a smaller variety of platforms,” he stated.
Meaning a aircraft that may collect intelligence and strike enemy targets on the bottom.
“It is actually a multirole airplane that is able to working with a really mild logistics footprint in small disaggregated groups…in very austere areas,” Slife stated.