In aerial combat, then, low tech may be the new high tech. And there is one other advantage that the turboprop has over the jet, at least according to Mr Read—who flew turboprops on combat missions in Cambodia during the 1970s. It is that you can use a loudspeaker to talk to potential targets before deciding whether to attack them. As Winston Churchill so memorably put it: “When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”
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Warfare on the cheap is all the rage these days and this is an excellent little article from the Economist on the subject of cheap air power. I just talked about Colombia’s use of these types of aircraft in their war against the FARC and I thought I would add further information behind the concept. I should also note that PMC’s like Executive Outcomes had their own air assets for operations, and that too could be classified as ‘air power on the cheap’. If it gets the job done and you are dealing with an enemy that has no air power, then these ideas make sense.
The one thing I keep thinking about though, is that I like cheap air power that has a high probability of survival. Or better yet, is cheap and unmanned. I think as soon as we can put robotics into these cheap propeller type aircraft, then we are effectively creating cheaper drones with built in supply and maintenance systems. Imagine an unmanned Cessna Caravan doing these types of military missions?
Or an unmanned cargo carrier like a 747 with a payload of JDAM type munitions that could be dropped from extreme heights? There are plenty of these old, yet still working aircraft that could be outfitted with robotics. Cheap drones produced from such aircraft could be a market all by itself, and especially as smaller nations join the larger nations in their desire to have this capability– for a fraction of the price.
Not to take away from the value of having a human in the cockpit, which to me is still the smartest computer out there. I think there will always be a need for this man and machine relationship, and especially if future small wars will require extreme discipline and precision, along with common sense and a feel for the battle field. Only a guy in the plane can really get that feel for their little patch of war and how to dominate the enemy and work with other forces. We might get there one day with UAVs, but I still think humans will have a place. –Matt
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The Super Tucano, made by Embraer.
Small, slow and inexpensive propeller-driven planes are starting to displace fighter jets
Sep 20th 2010
JET fighters may be sexy in a Tom Cruise-ish sort of way, but for guerilla warefare—in which the enemy rarely has an air force of his own with which to dogfight—they are often not the tool for the job. Pilotless drones can help fill the gap. Sometimes there is no substitute for having a pilot on the scene, however, so modern air forces are starting to turn to a technology from the yesteryear of flying: the turboprop.
So-called light-attack turboprops are cheap both to build and to fly. A fighter jet can cost $80m. By contrast the 208B Caravan, a light-attack turboprop made by Cessna, costs barely $2m. It also costs as little as $500 a hour to run when it is in the air, compared with $10,000 or more for a fighter jet. And, unlike jets, turboprops can use roads and fields for takeoff and landing.