Hi everyone. This is my first post here, so please bear with me.
I once saw a video of an exchange btw. a top USAF general and senator Mc Cain during a congress hearing. It was about the future of the A-10. The general was saying that when the A-10 will be retired, the CAS mission will be spread out among various planes, including the B-1. That seems to make Sen. Mc Cain quite unhappy along the lines of "how can you tell me that a strategic bomber can become a CAS plane ???!!!"
I guess that what the general meant was that the B-1 can be used as a high-flying bomb-truck loitering for hours over an area and dropping JDAMS or other precision munitions as needed.
It is quite obvious that a B-1 can do this mission well as it has the payload capacity and range to do it quite comfortably.
However, this is probably not the most effectve use of a platform like the B-1 which has a quite high cost per flight hour. Wouldn't it be possible to use slightly modified transport planes (C-17, C-130, ...) to do the same mission? Inserting a custom designed bomb rack/delivery mechanism into the cargo bay does not seem like a huge deal. Of course, it could not achieve the same dropping speed as a vertically opening bomb bay but for the CAS bomb-truck mission, in which only a couple of bombs have to be dropped at a time, this would not matter.
Of course, a transport plane has to worry about shifts in its center of gravity, but airdrops of heavy payloads (far heavier than a few JDAMs) are conducted on a routine basis so I do not see why this would be an issue.
In doday's mostly permissive insurgency-related air environments, I do not see why a transport plane would be threatened in any way. Most insurgency groups have only MANPADS, at best, and it is possible to fly high enough to not bother with those and yet be in a position to deliver precision guided munitions with ease.
There may be of course some reason that I am not aware of. If so, please enlighten me.
I once saw a video of an exchange btw. a top USAF general and senator Mc Cain during a congress hearing. It was about the future of the A-10. The general was saying that when the A-10 will be retired, the CAS mission will be spread out among various planes, including the B-1. That seems to make Sen. Mc Cain quite unhappy along the lines of "how can you tell me that a strategic bomber can become a CAS plane ???!!!"
I guess that what the general meant was that the B-1 can be used as a high-flying bomb-truck loitering for hours over an area and dropping JDAMS or other precision munitions as needed.
It is quite obvious that a B-1 can do this mission well as it has the payload capacity and range to do it quite comfortably.
However, this is probably not the most effectve use of a platform like the B-1 which has a quite high cost per flight hour. Wouldn't it be possible to use slightly modified transport planes (C-17, C-130, ...) to do the same mission? Inserting a custom designed bomb rack/delivery mechanism into the cargo bay does not seem like a huge deal. Of course, it could not achieve the same dropping speed as a vertically opening bomb bay but for the CAS bomb-truck mission, in which only a couple of bombs have to be dropped at a time, this would not matter.
Of course, a transport plane has to worry about shifts in its center of gravity, but airdrops of heavy payloads (far heavier than a few JDAMs) are conducted on a routine basis so I do not see why this would be an issue.
In doday's mostly permissive insurgency-related air environments, I do not see why a transport plane would be threatened in any way. Most insurgency groups have only MANPADS, at best, and it is possible to fly high enough to not bother with those and yet be in a position to deliver precision guided munitions with ease.
There may be of course some reason that I am not aware of. If so, please enlighten me.