Pierre Sprey, btw, is an interesting character. After retiring from military projects he became a record producer specializing in highbrow jazz obscurities. An original hipster!
Also the father of the A-10, which the air force hates but is so useful. He arrived at the design after studying how air power was used in WWII. We still get a lot of utility out of the A-10. The air force is of course trying to kill it still.
Just a guess: the A-10 is designed as a support aircraft for ground troops, which means that if it does its job perfectly, the Army gets to claim a decisive victory. The F-15 is an air-superiority fighter, which means that if it does its job perfectly, the Air Force claims a decisive victory. Inter-service rivalry is a Thing...from the POV of an ordinary citizen, it doesn't matter as long as we whup the bad guys, but from the POV of a career military bureaucrat it matters a lot whether the victory is credited to his branch of the service.
Yep exactly. The A-10 isn't glamorous. The air force hates interdiction missions even though they're among the most useful. The A-10 is also relatively cheap and can loiter over the battlefield for a long time
Wait, I thought they liked interdiction missions (e.g. keeping the enemy from resupplying the front), and that's congruent with their service goals.
Close air support is another matter altogether. Ugly, dirty, and a high potential for friendly fire causalities, which makes them look very bad in today's unrealistic no errors allowed environment. E.g. nowadays in our too common non-existential wars if an officer flying a plane hits friendlies, I'd suspect his career will be over.
Of course, the A-10 can do both, but the greater ability to do close air support, unlike say the F-111 back when we were flying it, means it will be called up to do so.
Another issue is that things like GPS guidance means close air support can be done without getting as up close and personal, and if the guys on the ground supply their own coordinates instead of the target's, as I seem to recall having happened at least once, it's on them.
I do, actually; he says it himself in the video. And the F15 didn't start as a multi-purpose fighter; it started as a single-purpose fighter. It was when the bureaucratic process started that the design of the plane changed and arguably ruined the design.
The motto when the Eagle was being designed was "Not a pound for air to ground." This was consistent through the A model to the C model. But a funny thing happens when you design an aircraft with incredible performance; it can often succeed in secondary roles. This was true of the F-15, and it was also true of the F-14. This isn't something new, it harkens back to WW2 with the P-47.
Considering the success of the F-15 in all of it's models, I'd love to see what you consider is ruined about its design.
And as I've been reading in Fire In The Sky: The Air War In The South Pacific (http://www.amazon.com/Fire-In-The-Sky-Pacific/dp/0813338697/), also many other 2nd generation US WWII air superiority fighters (2nd generation are those after the Wildcat and P-40). Could also fire rockets, and the author says in theory (and assuming you hit the target, a bit of trick back then), a salvo of 5 inch ones would roughly equal a destroyer's broadside.
Someone managed to put enough thrust on the thing, such that the design couldn't get too ruined. The F-15 has enough thrust to fly a brick! One landed safely with a wing torn off by a mid-air collision.
Partially it was thrust that allowed the one with no wing to land but also that the fuselage was designed as a lifting body itself creating significant lift.
Pierre Sprey, btw, is an interesting character. After retiring from military projects he became a record producer specializing in highbrow jazz obscurities. An original hipster!