US Military Doctrine: If it Works, Junk it.

The retrieval of a downed US airman in Iran (albeit at the cost of several hundred million dollars worth of aircraft destroyed in the course of the operation) is doubtless even now being adapted for book and screen with the aid and encouragement of the U.S. Air Force. That being the case, we can expect to hear little of the crucial role played by a plane the USAF is anxious to discard; the A-10 “Warthog.” The plane, designed to survive extensive damage from enemy fire and thus allow pilots to maneuver close enough to the ground to make accurate observations, is ideally suited for rhe combat search and rescue mission. So it proved in the recent Iran rescue: which was directed by an A-10 pilot who not only had a clear view of the situation on the ground but was also in direct radio communication with the downed airman. Other A-10s protected the area from enemy attack. Needless to say, this is not the story the air force wants recorded in the history books, since it is in the final throes of discarding its remaining fleet of 160 Warthogs. This marks the culmination of a decades-long campaign, stimulated by the service’s institutional disdain for ;the A-10’s core mission of supporting troops on the ground.

Wood is Good

But the air force is not alone in its urge to discard weapons that are cheap, comparatively simple to build and maintain, and useful. The ongoing fiasco in the Persian Gulf reminds us that the US Navy has a similar approach. It has long been clear that mines are a supremely effective naval weapon. A motley armory of mines enabled the Ottoman Turks to turn back a British fleet advancing through the Dardanelles in World War 1. A belated mining campaign in Japanese home waters using bombers reluctantly provided by the air force devastated the Japanese industrial economy in the closing months of World War 2. Mines deterred U.S. amphibious landings in the Korean and 1991 Gulf wars. Given this strong historical record, one might expect the Navy to devote great care and attention to dealing with this formidable weapon. Not so, at least not nowadays. In the late 1980s the Navy did commission and buy a fleet of 14 Avenger class minesweepers endowed with a surprising amount of commonsense features The hulls were wooden, coated with fiberglass, thus rendering them impervious to the threat of magnetic mines. The ships’ manually operated SQQ-32 sonar proved highly proficient in spotting mines either moored or lurking on the sea floor which could then be identified and destroyed by the remotely operated AN/SLQ-48 submersible. The ships had no mission other than mine-hunting, enabling the crews to train and become highly skilled in the task. The last of the Avenger class was launched in 1990 and the shipyard went out of business a few years later.

Multi-Mission = Multi-Screwup

Scarcely a decade went by before the Navy conceived a replacement minesweeper in the form of the Littoral Combat Ship, later to be immortalized by crews as the Little Crappy Ship. This was to have multi-mission capabilities (always a misbegotten idea) replacing both the Oliver Perry class frigate in its anti-submarine role and the Avenger class minesweeping mission as well as bombarding enemy coastlines when required. The facilities for these missions would be housed in modules that could supposedly be removed and replaced depending on the mission. In keeping with this spirit of interchangeability, crews were also to be swapped around, ensuring that none would feel any particular sense of responsibility for any specific ship, and could therefore blame all shortcomings on someone else.

Everything could go Wrong, and It Did.

Instead of a planned competitive procurement, Congressional maneuverings ensured that both competitors for the contract, a trimiran design offered by General Dynamics, and a cigarette-boat concept from Lockheed, were bought. Among innumerable other deficiencies, Lockheed’s offering suffered from an existential engine transmission problem that compelled the Navy to junk this variant. Meanwhile the General Dynamics variant, dubbed the Independence class, fared little better. We know this from a host of reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, which noted in its 2022 report that the ship was “not operationally suitable” in its anti-mine role.