Last Trap of the Tomcat – Part II

I began this post on 2/22/2006. I filed it as a draft. Today, whislt driving about for work, I began to ponder the effect of the F-14 Tomcat on my “generation.” Part I will cover some history, and in that, a discussion of how/why the Military gets such toys, and also why it quits using them, too.

Military.com reports the last F-14 combat mission ever has occurred.

The “Anytime, Baby!” guys got their airframe about the time I was commissioned. A few years later, as counter-battery in the recruiting wars, the Navy gleefully helped Hollywood make “Top Gun.”

I stopped there, but had captured the article. Here we go….

The Tomcat went into service the same year I did, 1972. It, as with all other equipment the US Military buys, was bought with a purpose in mind, with the operational requirements laid out by a bunch of people trying to project into the future, many years before then. Being a major procurement program to replace the McDonald F-4 Phantom II, the entire process received an equivalent amount of scrutiny by all levels of government.

The story within this story is instructive for those who often wonder “What were they thinking?” when they see some piece of expensive military equipment being a perceived “misfit” in it’s role of the moment. The beginning of a development is a “threat assessment.” What does the bad guy have now (since you just got surprised) or what do you think he is building, based on available intelligence? The answer to the threat assessment then makes the “OR” (operational requirement) pretty clear. You have to be able to counter the threat. The ORs come from the “Fleet” (in the case of the Navy), making sure the people currently assigned to the duties of war fighting make the major input to the capabilities the new system will have to meet. Shore duty “pukes” and contractors have to sit on the side lines and bite their tongues, or lobby at the bar after the big meeting, hoping to get their 2 cents into the equation. The purpose is keep the people who are not going to have their body parts on the line from “gold plating” projects, at the expense of the tax payers’ good graces. For all the grumbling about these decisions, know it’s a pretty good system to keep costs down, but, yes, sometimes a really expensive hammer does show up in a project plan.

Along the way in all of this, the ORs become reality when the actual contractor is chosen to build the item. In most all cases, this comes many years later, and the warfighters who suffered through the many hours of meetings, at the expense of their professional development, have moved on the retirement or shore duty, and now the people behind them have to keep the flame burning and answering questions of the contractors, the Pentagon at large, and taxpayers. This can be a daunting task, for even if the note taking in the early days was exceptionally well done, there never seems to be the time, nor were many of the side conversations that supported some of the decisions captured to aid in the present discussions. In this, the oversight of the Operational Test Force comes into play, and the project officers “ride herd” on the Fleet guys and the contractors to make sure the equipment does what was laid out in the system requirements, which came from the ORs.

That’s the short way into the F-14 story. In the 60s, the Soviet Union was building up its fleet for defense of the Motherland. While the oceans provided a great buffer, our ability to conduct long range air strikes with several varieties of conventional and nuclear capable platforms, such as the A-3D Sky Warrior, the A-4 Skyhawk, and the A-6 Intruder, the Soviets wanted to take out our carriers before they could get within launch range of the homeland. The counter force to ours was not Soviet aircraft carriers, but massive amounts of SNAF (Soviet Naval Air Force) bombers, equipped with supersonic cruise missiles. Additionally, they put guided missile submarines (SSG/SSGN) to sea, and also put the missile capability aboard surface ships, mostly of the cruiser size, when it was a missile designed to sink air craft carriers quickly.

Soviet TU-16 “Badgers,” TU-95 “Bears,” and later TU-22 “Blinders” and TU-160 “Backfires” would come in massive formations, guided towards CVBGs (Carrier Battle Groups) by forward observer platforms, usually of the TU-95 “Bear D” variant, using it’s underslung “Big Bulge” search radar and video data link to pass the information of the location to the armed aircraft, submarines and surface ships, waiting over our long range radar horizons. The bombers would be armed with cruise missiles that were essentially the size of a small fighter aircraft, packed with explosives. The AS-2 “Kipper,” AS-4 “Kitchen,” -5 “Kelt,” and -6s “Kingfish” were all in this category, capable of being launched from 100 to 200 miles from the carriers. The AS-4 and -6 were particularly nasty, as the climbed high, then approached at several times the speed of sound, and then pitched over towards the target at a very steep angle, making it exceptionally difficult for our gun systems to track and engage the missile in its terminal phase (think ORs for those gun systems that did not envision that threat capability when they were developed, rather than people consciously building a “bad” system).

Welcome to the party the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. Admiral “Hammerin’ Hank” Mustin, while the Second Fleet Commander, often stated his doctrine of “shoot the archer, not the arrow” to say the easier shot is the one at the sub, or not too supersonic, large profile bomber, than to deal with multiple, small, high speed inbound cruise missile, and the F-14 did this in spades. Capt Lex may yuck it up that the F-14 is gone, but even he knows it was the right platform for its time. In a match up between the two aircraft for some DACT (dissimilar aircraft training), and “BVR” (beyond visual range) weaponry being used as it was intended, the “Anytime, Baby!” aviators would be the first ones back with notches in the belts, drinking a few at the O Club and saying things like “Yeah, we had them on radar in plenty of time to smoke them like cheap cigars at about 100NM. You should have heard them whining all the way to impact about how it was so unfair for us to have Phoenix onboard!”
>/p>

The AIM-54 Phoenix missile, targeted by the AN/AWG-9 radar was more than a match for the Soviet bombers. Being able to be punched off the deck with 6 AIM-54s, it could “buster” (in afterburners) out to Combat Air Patrol (CAP) station on a threat vector quickly (combat radius of 500 miles +), being capable of doing more than twice the speed of sound (think 1500+ mph as a round figure, and BTW, that’s Mach 2+!). The AWG-9 radar could scan a sector, and simultaneously track a target for each missile. The AIM-54 range was demonstrated to be in excess of 100 NM. Add a CAP station about 200 miles down the threat axis and a few sections of F-14s, and the bad guys were going to have tough sledding to reach their launch points. More than likely, they would be swimming with the fish before they could get their cruise missiles off their rails, which, from my perspective, was a very, very good thing. Oh, I forgot to mention, not only could these cruise missiles of the Soviets go really fast, and carry a lot of explosives (enough to do serious damage to an armored aircraft carrier), they could carry nuclear warheads, as well, which meant those of us in the “screen” in small boys, or aboard the supporting oilers and ammunition ships in the vicinity would be in serious danger as well. I really liked the idea of the F-14 being the main fighter in service.

Compare and contrast this with the oh, so sexy “lawn dart” known as the F/A-18 Hornet. Is this an aircraft the pilots dearly love? Does it have a really cool radar that does serious magic, can be used in air-to-air or air-to-ground modes? Yes, it does. Can it be equally at home yanking and banking in ACM (air combat maneuvers), as well as “mud moving?” Yep, that too. Can the Hornet dogfight successfully without having the jettison stores meant for a ground target? Check. Does the Hornet have the “legs” to get way out on station and still put a major hurting on a bomber with a 200 NM reach? Not so sure (with out lots of tankers, which then decrements the number of fighters being fighters)? Nope. Interestingly enough, the initial OR for the F/A-18 had a combat radius that wasn’t attainable during operational testing. It seems the then SECNAV, John Lehman directed the combat radius for the F/A-18 in the test documents be lessened, so that we could get the production rolling, hence the knick name of “lawn darts” being applied. Toss them up, and they come back down. The F/A-18E/F “Super Hornets” that came along later provided more fuel tank space in the wings, addressing this issue.

Enough for now….if ou’ve hung on this long, stay tuned for Part II, where I will discuss how the Tomcat was a revolutionary aircraft in the annals of the Navy from a personnel perspective…

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!

From a comment on a post over at Little Green Footballs:

#257 Blue Chip 2/28/2006 01:35PM PST

Ok, time for a little levity.

I’m working on a parody of the Oscars (apologies to all the parody masters out there-I’m a novice-It’s a work in progress).

Any feedback – much appreciated.

* Backstage at the Oscars Rehearsal *

Producer: “Five minutes everybody! Places please! This is a live rehearsal! Camera one – zoom in on Jon!”

Jon Stewart: “Dick? I’m gonna open with the Bush/Cheney ‘Brokeback Mountain’ joke. Maybe use the “Capote & Cheney Hunting” stuff later? You know, after we have the “Jumpin’ Jihad” musical number. What do you think?”

Producer: “Yeah, that works. Don’t forget Rosie O’Donnell and Nathan Lane are doing the “Gay Love Stories at the Movies” montage right after you. Keep it tight on the monologue. We don’t have a lot of time before the commercial break…”

Jon Stewart: “Right. Alex Baldwin and Marty Sheen are still doing the “Support the Troops – Vote Democrat” mock PSA? That’ll kill! Funny stuff!”

Producer: “Of course. Camera Two? Make sure you get a good shot of Cindy Sheehan sitting next to Michael Moore during Jon’s monologue! Third joke in, wait for the line “Bush loves cartoons at the movies….”

Jon Stewart: “Cindy promised to wear her tee shirt if we showed it. That still a go?”

Producer: “Hell yeah! This isn’t the ‘State of the Union’ speech, you know. We still have free speech in Hollywood! By the way, make sure you pull all the “Mohammad – The Musical” jokes”

Jon Stewart: “I pulled all the Mohammad jokes. No sense offending a respected religion for no reason. We don’t need any grief over being ‘insensitive’ to cultural differences.

Producer: “Absolutely. That’s the same reason we dropped Theo Van Gogh from the “In Memoriam” montage. I mean, the guy basically made a hate film. We can’t celebrate that.

Jon Stewart: “Not enough fire insurance in the world to mention that guy! Can you imagine?!? They’d burn the theater down!

Producer: “Hell! They’d burn half of Hollywood down!”

Jon Stewart: “Is Redgrave going to hand out the award to “Paradise Now” when Palestine wins for best foreign film?”

Producer: “Who else? She’s always supported them. We thought it was a good fit. Should be an interesting acceptance speech, too.”

Jon Stewart “Did the President tape a message for opening credits? Like Clinton did?”

Producer: “The President….? Of the Academy….?”

Jon Stewart: “No – the President of the United States. You know, Bush?”

Producer: “Hell no! Will Farrell is doing a really funny impersonation of him we filmed last week. It has ‘Bush’ trying to figure out what the films are about based on just their titles! It’s a scream! He thinks ‘Crash’ is about NASCAR! Our audience will love it”

🙂

FbL has an update on the progress of one wounded serviceman, a recipient of a laptop and voice activated software several months back.

Note this:

The laptop was the first step to the road to recovery. It proved that he was going to be able to do all the things that he did before.

For more info, and to see what a bunch of committed, Type A competitors can do when a need arises, check out this link to my post on the Veteran’s Day 2005 fund raising drive…

Valour-IT is an ongoing project. Please consider supporting it as you can.

Breaking News!

Taliban militants besides lauching attacks against Afghan and foreign troops, intensifying the attacks to destroy the female schools.

Go figure. With NATO, US, Afghan Army and Pakistani troops to pick on, they do what they do best: Go for the “soft” target. Translation: They can’t handle a fight, but they can be the armed with AK-47 and RPG equivalent of the school yard bully.

I guess they are felling pretty emasculated because women now get to learn something. You have to be really insecure to try to kill them, just so they don’t learn….or you are ashamed they will find out they have been getting the short end of the stick (or the longer end quite literally) since the days when Mohammed decided he had had enough of Christianity making everyone equal, and turned back the clock to recapture the worst of the male dominated Jewish culture. Yep, it’s a great “religion” alright.

In reference to the current debate over the NSA “wiretapping” issue, we have been here before.

The situation is in many ways similar, but, it was a different time. It was a time when an attack on American soil awakened a sleeping giant, that then, with a crippled, and barely adequate military, travelled across two large oceans and set their youth into harm’s way, with the will of the people firmly behind them.

The first engagement in the Pacific was Pearl Harbor. The enemy took the initiative and caught us unprepared for the challenge, despite General Billy Mitchell having shown us we were not able to protect our national security in the late 30’s.

The next engagement in that theater was the Battle of the Coral Sea, where a non aviation admiral, Admiral Raymond Spruance, took a new type of battle force against a powerful enemy and he held the line of the Japanese advance into the southern Pacific. As a side note, much has been written critisizing Adm Spruance for his perceived lack of agressiveness with his fleet, but the bottom line is we had suffered major blows and his conservative approach acheived a turning point, where they progressed no more.

Next came a tiff in the vicinity of a very small island, big enough for little more than an airstrip and populated by gooney birds named Midway. It was an incredible naval victory for the US, where we caught the Japanese carriers by surprise. Heroism was a common virtue in that battle, with famous names of ships such as USS THATCH and USS McCLUSKEY being named after valiant aviators who carried the day in that moment.

What allowed us to sink four Japanese carriers to the loss of our one (YORKTOWN)? It began with what we might call “wiretapping” today: Interception and reading of the Japanese Naval Code.

The story is incredible, how a group of Navy code breakers struggled to break the code, then had a dummy “in the clear” message sent from Midway, saying the island was running out of fresh water. In subsequent intercepts, the Japanese coded messages reported this “condition,” and therefore our experts were then confident they had the right methods to ensure other coded messages “breaks” could be given the highest degree of confidence.

Read this excerpt from a site discussing the history of the Midway Atoll:

During World War II, the U.S. utilized a great military intelligence advantage over the Japanese, in both their radar capabilities and code breaking. The radar on Midway gave position, bearing, and altitude. Intelligence experts discovered that the Japanese planned to attack an unknown site referred to as “AF.” To test the theory that Midway was the target, a disinformation message regarding Midway’s freshwater supply was sent out over open communication channels. The Japanese intercepted the message and redistributed it in their JN 25 code, saying that “AF” needed freshwater. This strengthened intelligence allowed Admiral Nimitz to reinforce Midway’s defenses and station additional bombers, fighters, and torpedo aircraft on Eastern Island in preparation for the suspected attack.

Clearly, our govenrment officials, with the sanction of the President, had listened in on the tactical and strategic messages of the enemy, who intended to harm us, in this case, once more, as a follow up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Across time, this method has been hailed as the runing point of the War in the Pacific, and how in less than a year, a underdeveloped Navy had come back from a major blow, devised entirely new strategies, and had taken the fight to the enemy. Pretty impressive.

Should we now impunge the character of President Roosevelt (who had the Bill of Rights as a restriction on his actions) and demand a reversal? No, that would be ludicrous.

Look at the common threads:

1) Japan wanted resources. We blocked them with embargos. They decided to destroy us in order to be able to go to the areas of the world where oil, metal and rubber resources were, and take them via a military presense. We reacted with economic sanctions on them, thus causing shortages of the strategic materials of the day.

2) Japan, acting as the agressor, attacked our soverign territory.

3) Japan planned another attack on our territiory.

4) Government officials, acting on official orders, listened in on the conversations of the enemy (Japan) in order to find out how to defend our nation.

5) Japan lost the war, yet is now a major democratic and economic powerhouse, and is not occupied by the United States, in fact, they are one of our closest allies.

See the connection? The difference is the modern day agressors in this story do not have the covering of a soverign nation status, and defined borders, but otherwise, they still desire to attack and destroy us, for we interfere with their expansionist plans, and desire for major power status on the world’s stage. The Islamic terrorists do not want the strategic materials, they just want sharia law spread worldwide and have proven they will kill those who are 1) weak and 2) those who resist.

Polish mathematicians broken the German Enigma Codes, and turned that information over to the British, who exploited it throughouot the way, and shared the intelligence with us to re-route naval convoys of troops and material around U-Boats in the Atlantic.

We also were reading the Berlin-Tokyo diplomatic message, as a result of breaking that Japanese set of codes.

In each of these three cases, this effort produced free people and not more oppression. Why can’t anyone see that in the current situation?

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

Via Mudville Gazette Dawn Patrol this morning, I followed a link to One Marine’s View titled “This Young Marine Breaks the Code.”

I was not disappointed.

“When I joined the Marine Corps in February of 2002, I was really looking for a way to pay for college. The college I attended for just one semester went bankrupt, causing me to lose my full scholarship. I signed the enlistment papers never thinking about going to war, even though the United States was attacked by terrorists just a few months earlier.”

Scrolling thru the comments on Capt B’s blog, which quoted this Marine Sargent, I found the Sargent himself had left a comment, thanking the Captain for posting his letter, and a link to a new blog, Myskatterbrain. The first post is the letter by the one who wrote it in the first place. He decided to juimp into the blogsphere, and I might add, with an incredible start.

I’ve marvelled for many years at the comraderie the Corps builds. Once in a while, I even think back to the day at the end of my college sophomore year, standing in front of a towering Marine major, the AOIC of the NROTC Unit, and telling him I had decided to go into the Navy, for there seemed to be little use for marine biologists in the USMC. He thought a moment and agreed. I bretahed a sigh of relief. I enjoyed my career driving ships, but there are days I see I might had had something more special…

Please read the first person report on the transformation of a man in his thinking. You won’t be disappointed, and you will know many others have travelled the same path.

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!

I use Netscape as my browser. I started with it in the way back days of the web and have kept it.

The Netscape homepage hilights the news with a main article, then three that rotate in a window just underneath that.

Top story:

“7 Children Die in Hiway Crash; 15 Year Old Driving” – Yes, a bad thing…

Rotating stories:

1: “Breakfast Battles: Watch Out McD’s” – It seems the Egg McMuffin is loosing ground in the fast food, spike your sugar and cholesteral in the morning market. HORRORS!

2: “Militant Group Wins Palestinian Election; PM Resigns” – mmmm…Sorta important, but no words really grab you much.

3: “A Happy Hot Rod Homecoming” – Cool! The dude gets his Vette that was stolen 37 years ago….

Wow…news of violent, islamic terrorists winning a majority of the seats in the election os a soverign nation is (pardon the pun) “sandwiched” between news of a major fast food chain losing market share at the drive thru window and some guy getting his car back. I’d say “they” sort of missed out on the understanding of the importance of each of the news stories, but then again, we can’t say “they” never report “good” news….

The media said they don’t censor the news, but there is so much to choose from and so little time to report it, they have to select carefully. I submit their selections, particulalry today, as the democratic mechanism of voting has brought a procalimed terrorist organization into the access to nation status. But, then again, Iran did the same thing, and speaking of that, the media sure isn’t very concerned about that either….

Isn’t it interesting how this analogy can help understand a complex issue. Let me begin with the story of the P-3C Orion Update II version.

I think it was while I was on the Destroyer Squadron staff when I recall seeing a message declaring how the newest version of the P-3C Orion would not be called the P-3D, but rather the P-3C/Update II. Having built a lot of plane models growing up, and spenind a lot of thime studying the military aircraft of the WWII era, I had come to understand that when a major modification of an aircraft was made, they changed the letter at the end of the designation. The B-17F became the B-17G when they hung a remotely controlled set of .50 cal guns in a chin turret. The P-47, when it got a bubble canopy, vs the old framed one, became the P-47D. The P-38 had lots of variants, some as fighters, some as light bombers, some as photo recon, others as Pathfinders. Each carried a different letter behind the “38.”

Fast forward to the mid-80s. The P-3 airframe, a military adaptation (quite succesful one at that, for it still patrols the oceans) of the Lockheed Electra passenger plane was getting a major internal makeover. All sorts of more automated gadgets were being stuffed in and now the decision had to be made as to how to dsesigate it. Between the lettering scehme noted in the previous paragragh, and what I learned, there is significant reason to point this out, for the people having to call on the aircraft will know what’s up there supporting them, or, during mission planning, may have to be specific requests to make sure the operational function comes off as planned.

Why didn’t the “P-3D” come into the nomenclature? Simple…it’s all about money. I learned long ago, the best way to figure out complex issues is to take a look at the money trail, and you may glean some interesting information. In this case, it wasn’t the money for the airframe, or the ground support, but it was the issue of the printing and distrobution costs for the change pages for the plethora of publications in existance that referenced the “P-3C.” You know, Admin Warfare, the undiscussed mission area, is important! The message that told us to use P-3C/Update II indicated it was cost prohibative to change all the TACMEMOs, NWPs, NTPs, etc, etc, etc, so henceforth and foreevermore, all we would be able to say if we had a “P-3C.” Make sense?

By now, I hope you didn’t get lost in the story and are anxiously awaiting the connection to Gay Marriage.

Here it is: It’s about the money. Money, you ask? Yes. Here’s the deal. Civil unions won’t suffice. Like the many forests of printed pubs with “P-3C” that the Navy wasn’t about to change, the veritable mountain of legal and regulatory documents out there in the world that say “marriage” in the context of legal rights on allowance of benefits are too many to consider trying to get to change them, one by one, in order to them to say “marriage and/or civil union” would cost lots. On top of that, unlike the control over this decison to change or not being in the hands of the Navy alone (or, in a worst case, the Department of Defense), these documents are under the purview of all sorts of private companies as well. You can’t change them just by having the federal government deeming it so. Not only that, it would mean each occurance of resistance to granting rights similar to those granted to straight married people would have to be the approached legally by the person encoutering it, meaning more money out of the pockets of the gay person seeking compensation.

The documents will range from applications for insurance, health care plans, employee handbooks and claims forms for all types of insurance. While someone may annonce an equivalency between “marriage” and “civil unions,” there will be plenty of businesses that would drag their feet, or flat out say “it says ‘marriage’ here. sorry!”

Therefore, the most effective path to gain access to the many things we grant two people who have promised each other, under a legal contract, to take care of the other, only a nationwide decree of the legality of marriage will suffice. That means, no matter how hard the uphill battle for the activists for this course of action seems, the bottom line is it will then instantly take down all barriers in every other place they may come in contact with resistance, for they hold up a piece of paper saying “Marriage License.” The other beauty of this approach is that not every document would have to be known at the time. The acceptance of a “civil union” might make things better for many, but the lingering cases would continue to pop up for years to come, with the associated legal bills and time spent waiting for a clogged court system to hear the case.

All this discussion is to help understand why the issue of gay marriage is being pushed so hard right now, and will continue to be. It’s the path of least resistance.

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!

From Military.com, an M-60 A4 firing 850 rounds “at one sitting.” It seems the old standby crew served weapon has been given improved qualities…They said it goes 15K rounds before a barrel change.

See it here.

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Post!

I won’t bore you with lots of links, but between the Judge Alito pontifications, the Abrahamoff, the Tom Delay fake consiracy charges…It seems when “it” is brought up by the libs, they soon find out it’s people in their own party doing the same kind of things, be it falisifying travel claims, moving PAC money around, taking PAC money, or wiretapping….

The items come and go so fast, you almost can’t read them.

Here’s my counsel for the liberals/Democrats:

I know, I know….you would never really handle any type of weapon, but consider this in a parable style of instruction, the way Jesus teaches…it’s in the analogy, not the specific words (or images, in this case)

’nuff said (for now)

If this information has helped you in anyway, please pop over to Project Valour-IT and ,ake a donation to the program to get laptop computers for our wonded service members as compensation for my counselling.

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the Open Thread!