War Is Boring

OV-10 Bronco for “Combat Fedex”

18.03.09

Thirty years ago, Fedex changed a lot of people’s assumptions about logistics. Skeptics laughed when Fred Smith proposed customers might pay a big premium to deliver small packages, fast, despite the seemingly disproportionate cost. Today, everybody accepts that sometimes it’s worth spending $10 to get a letter across the country, overnight.

There’s a similar sea change underway in the military. It used to be that military logistics were all about shifting huge amounts of material, very slowly. But today firefights are won or lost for want of a particular battery, radio or specialized munition — and lives are lost without adequate supplies of blood, plasma and bandages. You need that stuff fast, at any cost.

Which is why nobody objects when the Marines propose a high-tech drone for delivering small batches of supplies to isolated troops. Or why the National Security Space Office is studying suborbital “space-planes” that can deliver 5,000 pounds, anywhere in the world, in two hours. It’s for that reason that F-16-designer Pierre Sprey wants the Air Force to buy as many as 1,000 “dirt-strip” airlifters.

After eight straight years of low-intensity warfare, the U.S. military is finally getting back in to the light-attack aircraft business, a capability lost when the last Marine OV-10 Bronco was retired in 1994. The Navy is leasing four Super Tucanos to re-establish the capability. Anticipating ongoing demand for that class of planes, Boeing is mulling re-opening the OV-10 line.

And that means an opportunity to build up a new “combat Fedex” capability based on the OV-10, a plane that can operate from any reasonably flat, 300-foot stretch of terrain, and has a fuselage cargo bay with a capacity of more than a ton. The Marines even used the Bronco for dropping paratroopers, pictured. A two-ship of Broncos, orbiting for hours, armed with rockets and guns and carrying small loads of ammo, batteries and medical supplies, would be like angels to an isolated Marine company fighting for their lives down below.