16 V-22s have been written off due to accidents since 1991, according to Wikipedia. In the same period, the substantially smaller number of CH-53s flying around the world registered 68 aircraft written off due to damage (). Granted, a lot of those were due to worn-down older airframes and more challenging missions, the same way that many of the accidents with the V-22 were from pilots not being properly retrained for the completely new style of flying, or just because Boeing engineering cut one too many corners. But the V-22's loss rate is not representative of an inherent flaw of all tiltrotors, it's just the reality of operating a mechanically complex rotary wing aircraft. Or to put it another way: are you going to use this same flaw to justify why the CH-47 fleet should all be retired at once, despite their comparatively glowing safety record?
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
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The Aviation Week has some interesting details on the current state of US laser technology, including some upcoming demonstrations and planned ramp-up in production output for certain systems.
Pentagon’s Megawatt Laser Demo To Highlight Recent Tech Breakthroughs
Lots of really interesting stuff in this article!
Pentagon’s Megawatt Laser Demo To Highlight Recent Tech Breakthroughs
Lots of really interesting stuff in this article!
"Old soldiers never die, they simply are not allowed to retire."
The oldest aircraft carriers have to their service life extended, while the newest ones have no beds to sleep on (with deployment extended).
Nah, not really. March 12 report would likely refer to targets hit up to and including March 11, so 12 days in total for 5000 targets. 417 per day, on average. US had close to 300 tactical combat aircraft in the ME. Given that Gulf countries have been doing most of the defensive missions, majority of those US planes were free to actually fly over Iran. Plausibly 250+.
All those planes were flown into the theater to be ready for combat, meaning they did their big maintenance checks and should be able to do daily missions for weeks. Even so, US is still flying in a small number of planes into ME, possibly for airframe replacements. USAF doesn't really need to brake apart existing units as it's customary to send airframes out of a unit to deep maintenance and have that unit receive other airframes. That's done even during peacetime, so for a war like this, it'd be very normal for units to deploy only with the most ready airframes.
We don't really know number of sorties per plane per day, but it should concievably still be around 1, for the first few weeks, even with the starting roster of airframes. Possibly initial day or two had some airframes doing even 2 sorties per day. Not all sorties would result in iranian targets hit, of course. But given that Israel already dealt with a lot of Iranian AD back in 2025, it's not implausible that most US missions have indeed been ground strike ones. Some targets might've required multiple weapons but who knows how USAF is really counting that. It could well be that they equate a target with weapon used. If so, it wouldn't be surprising if average number of targets/weapons per sortie is 2-4 for fighter jets. Even if just half of the 250 jets were doing strike missions per day, that's something like 125 times 3 targets/weapons per day, so 350 to 400 per day.
It could've easily been fewer though because all that doesn't include bomber missions, of which there have been at least 20, with 2-4 bombers each and probably 16-24 weapons each per bomber. That's theoretically 1200 bombs/weapons on possibly as many targets just from bombers. Plus none of that includes tomahawks, a few hundred of which have likely be fired off on day 1. Nor does it include PrSM missiles. Possibly again tens of which might've been fired so far. Nor does it include Lucas drones, again possibly a few hundred fired so far. Not does it include possible Hellfire missiles fired from Reapers. CENTCOM footage of targets hit includes some very, very small explosions, which could've been done by Hellfire sized weapon warheads.
So, no, operational tempo doesn't surprise me so far. If anything, one might've expected even more targets hit in the given timeframe, given all the hardware that US brought in.
I am interested to see what a topline budget of ~$1.5 trillion will look like. Specifically, what will the major acquisition targets be and how will the budget be divided between the services?
($1.5 trillion for only the essentials
)
Breaking Defense article on the same subject added.
Though they were more cautious on actually reaching the $1.5 trillion topline (either via request or if congress will even fund something that close).
($1.5 trillion for only the essentials
)Breaking Defense article on the same subject added.
Though they were more cautious on actually reaching the $1.5 trillion topline (either via request or if congress will even fund something that close).