Comments by "Gort" (@gort8203) on "As Sweet as a Warthog! The Northrop YA-9A" video.
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People need to use a little perspective when they pass judgement on the procurement decisions of the cold war era. One common narrative is that the reason USAF had to use “hand me down” A-1s in Vietnam is because it was too focused on fast jets and ‘looked down’ on the CAS role. Yet the same critics don’t fault the U.S. Navy and Marines for divesting themselves of these A-1s as fast as they could replace them with fast jets.
Why were USAF and Navy BOTH focused on fast jets? Because the Eisenhower administration decided that trying to compete with the size of the Soviet conventional military forces was an unaffordable burden on the U.S. economy. Therefore the U.S. focused spending on strategic and tactical nuclear delivery systems in order to achieve deterrence. The goal was to deter a major ground war with the Soviets rather than fight one, and if it became necessary to actually fight one it would be fought with nuclear weapons, where the U.S. had superiority. Smaller conventional U.S. ground forces would remain for projection of presence and as a trip wire against the Soviets, but nobody in the U.S. was equipping to fight a protracted ground war. Equipping to fight brushfire conflicts in third world countries was also not a priority, and it was necessary leave such contingencies to the collateral capabilities of the main forces in the event such a conflict occurred.
The need to conduct conventional ‘limited warfare’ operations in Vietnam was an unwelcome event in the context of this plan. USAF entered that conflict with a force designed to deter nuclear war, but rapidly adapted to the need for fixed wing CAS. USAF was way ahead of the Navy and Marines in its use of slow prop aircraft for CAS, who made no attempt to resurrect slow prop airplanes dedicated to CAS. Yet USAF receives all the criticism despite a demonstrated willingness to adapt.
While the U.S. was busy in Vietnam the calculus of deterrence began to change, and nuclear weapons were no longer considered sufficiently reliable in deterring a conventional ground war. The Army developed the M-1 tank and TOW missile. Defending against both the Soviets and the U.S. Army caused USAF to acquire the A-10, which could be argued (on another day) was actually a mistaken procurement inspired by the last war rather than the next war. To this day USAF is the only U.S. service to ever procure a dedicated low and slow CAS jet aircraft. The very purpose of Marine air is to support the Marine on the ground, yet the Marines have been conducting CAS with supersonic jets since the 1960s, and have never asked for an equivalent to the A-10. They spend their limited finding on swept wing aircraft, including the inefficient S/VTOL variety.
The force of fast jets that many today see as a dumb mistake was driven by the reality of the real possibility of nuclear war, and the need to avoid it.
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