NS Military Worldbuilding Thread No. 12

[Hurtful Thoughts]

UAE aircraft are almost certainly better maintained than their US or European counterparts.

If you judge an air force's competence because they bombed the wrong thing once...well...I've got bad news for you.

maybe they should kill the bottom 10% of pilots

Nah, make them transport-pilots, worst case then is they'll land at the wrong airport then.

If they fail to land, well... let's just say that problem solves itself, then.

[The Grand World Order]

Well, unless you're either Hurty or GWO... or in enemy territory and have orders to kill civs and you're into those sorts of conflicts.

Someone found out the hard way why it's a bad idea to reenact the "No Russian" scene from CoD when there was a Hurti mechanized platoon chilling on the tarmac of that same airport awaiting their lift to the next op.

Even then, you have a very real possibility of a net gain of hostile forces by doing that.

Re: The UAE

The UAE's military are largely there for the status. UAE's modern culture generally consists of flaunting your "native Emirati" paycheck (literally) and having imported labor from India and Pakistan do everything that isn't considered prestigious. They have western gear not because they intend to ever actually do much with it, but because it is a symbol of wealth.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, flexes harder than oil rich Emiratis.

UAE aircraft are almost certainly better maintained than their US or European counterparts.

you made me choke on my baked potato. My squadron while I was in (the least funded branch, no less) had a 90% up rate with airframes from the 70's (EA-6B) while doing daily flight ops. The US averages more training flight hours (not simulations) than pretty much anyone else, too.

[Gallia-]

Yes, much like Saudi Arabia, all those petrostates hire well paid veteran maintainers for huge bucks instead of poorly paid conscripts or teenagers with no experience like Germany or America do.

The US manages about 100-120 flight hours per pilot (certain squadrons are allocated more during a few months before deployment, but this system is highly throughput limited) roughly, which is sufficient for extremely basic navigation and general flight training, and wholly inadequate to sustain a combat pilot. The RAF is probably the best maintained and best trained Air Force in all NATO and it's not that great because it suffers from the same issue as Western ones: all its veteran maintainers are sucked away to Saudi Arabia or UAE by offers of fat petrodollar paychecks.

In the 90s you could consider the Saudi Air Force to be RAF c. 1985, much like how the French Legion Etranger was a British-Polish parachute regiment.

[Hurtful Thoughts]

Yes, much like Saudi Arabia, all those petrostates hire well paid veteran maintainers for huge bucks instead of poorly paid conscripts or teenagers with no experience like Germany or America do.

Yep, and once those dollars dry up and the contract expires, or heaven forbid, foreign relations break down... that fleet is S-outta-L in terms of flight-readiness.

Hence why literally everything is starting to crash, literally.

The Thrush T-660 Archangel is the pinnacle of maintainability and yet that one suffered a major failure less than a year into being fielded because it was so simple the folks at Thrush didn't bother offering maintnance-crews.
-Its also because Blackwater Worldwide kinda ended up going belly-up after sealing that deal.

[Gallia-]

Yes, much like Saudi Arabia, all those petrostates hire well paid veteran maintainers for huge bucks instead of poorly paid conscripts or teenagers with no experience like Germany or America do.

Yep, and once those dollars dry up

They haven't in the past 30 years or so they've been doing it.

Hence why literally everything is starting to crash, literally.

The USAF has crashed more aircraft per sortie on average than something like Jordan or the UAE honestly, but even besides that the USAF probably hasn't crashed as much because they literally can't fly their aircraft. Which is worse than Jordan or the UAE can say, by far, because at least their air forces aren't grounded semi-permanently due to awful maintenance or whatever lmfao.

[Spirit of Hope]

Yes, much like Saudi Arabia, all those petrostates hire well paid veteran maintainers for huge bucks instead of poorly paid conscripts or teenagers with no experience like Germany or America do.

The US manages about 100-120 flight hours per pilot (certain squadrons are allocated more during a few months before deployment, but this system is highly throughput limited) roughly, which is sufficient for extremely basic navigation and general flight training, and wholly inadequate to sustain a combat pilot. The RAF is probably the best maintained and best trained Air Force in all NATO and it's not that great because it suffers from the same issue as Western ones: all its veteran maintainers are sucked away to Saudi Arabia or UAE by offers of fat petrodollar paychecks.

In the 90s you could consider the Saudi Air Force to be RAF c. 1985, much like how the French Legion Etranger was a British-Polish parachute regiment.

I mean if you are buying American gear, being trained by the Americans, and paying Americans to fix your equipment, you can't really say that your air force is all that great. Rather your Air force is a diversity hire of the US.

See previous statement, if you are willing/able to outsource a lot of the work you can get good pilots but it isn't really a winning strategy for your entire national military and requires you not piss of the guy giving you all the help.

[Hurtful Thoughts]

Yep, and once those dollars dry up

They haven't in the past 30 years or so they've been doing it.

Hence why literally everything is starting to crash, literally.

The USAF has crashed more aircraft per sortie on average than something like Jordan or the UAE honestly, but even besides that the USAF probably hasn't crashed as much because they literally can't fly their aircraft. Which is worse than Jordan or the UAE can say, by far, because at least their air forces aren't grounded semi-permanently due to awful maintenance or whatever lmfao.

Fatalities per sortie, though...

Like, when something goes wrong in the air, the pilot is in for a bad time.

[Gallia-]

They haven't in the past 30 years or so they've been doing it.



The USAF has crashed more aircraft per sortie on average than something like Jordan or the UAE honestly, but even besides that the USAF probably hasn't crashed as much because they literally can't fly their aircraft. Which is worse than Jordan or the UAE can say, by far, because at least their air forces aren't grounded semi-permanently due to awful maintenance or whatever lmfao.

Fatalities per sortie, though...

Yeah good pilots don't like to abandon their aircraft.

[The Grand World Order]

The US manages about 100-120 flight hours per pilot (certain squadrons are allocated more during a few months before deployment, but this system is highly throughput limited) roughly, which is sufficient for extremely basic navigation and general flight training, and wholly inadequate to sustain a combat pilot. The RAF is probably the best maintained and best trained Air Force in all NATO and it's not that great because it suffers from the same issue as Western ones: all its veteran maintainers are sucked away to Saudi Arabia or UAE by offers of fat petrodollar paychecks.

I dunno, at the Q we'd have at least two birds going out for 8-12 hours on the daily when we were stateside, more whenever we did WTI/Red Flag. Can't speak about the Air Force, nor for the Navy although I know NATOPS applies to both MC and Navy. F-35s are a train wreck regardless of branch tho.

[Hurtful Thoughts]

The US manages about 100-120 flight hours per pilot (certain squadrons are allocated more during a few months before deployment, but this system is highly throughput limited) roughly, which is sufficient for extremely basic navigation and general flight training, and wholly inadequate to sustain a combat pilot. The RAF is probably the best maintained and best trained Air Force in all NATO and it's not that great because it suffers from the same issue as Western ones: all its veteran maintainers are sucked away to Saudi Arabia or UAE by offers of fat petrodollar paychecks.

I dunno, at the Q we'd have at least two birds going out for 8-12 hours on the daily when we were stateside, more whenever we did WTI/Red Flag. Can't speak about the Air Force, nor for the Navy although I know NATOPS applies to both MC and Navy. F-35s are a train wreck regardless of branch tho.

Plus number of sorties doesn't always translate to a number of flight hours.

You can rack up a lot of sorties in 90 minutes if your bomb-target is 20 km from the airfield instead of 2000 km.

Which also gives even less excuse for any of their low-mileage planes crashing if your situation is a flight-crew's wet-dream of being able to inspect a bird every flight hour on the flight hour.

[Gallia-]

Yes, much like Saudi Arabia, all those petrostates hire well paid veteran maintainers for huge bucks instead of poorly paid conscripts or teenagers with no experience like Germany or America do.

The US manages about 100-120 flight hours per pilot (certain squadrons are allocated more during a few months before deployment, but this system is highly throughput limited) roughly, which is sufficient for extremely basic navigation and general flight training, and wholly inadequate to sustain a combat pilot. The RAF is probably the best maintained and best trained Air Force in all NATO and it's not that great because it suffers from the same issue as Western ones: all its veteran maintainers are sucked away to Saudi Arabia or UAE by offers of fat petrodollar paychecks.

In the 90s you could consider the Saudi Air Force to be RAF c. 1985, much like how the French Legion Etranger was a British-Polish parachute regiment.

I mean if you are buying American gear, being trained by the Americans, and paying Americans to fix your equipment, you can't really say that your air force is all that great. Rather your Air force is a diversity hire of the US.

See previous statement, if you are willing/able to outsource a lot of the work you can get good pilots but it isn't really a winning strategy for your entire national military and requires you not piss of the guy giving you all the help.

The "diversity hire of the US" is exactly why the Arabian air forces are so good, at least in peacetime. They're sapping the same resource pool that the USAF, US Marines, etc. need to function: capable maintainers and good NCO cadres. What few cadres and good maintenance units the US DOD has inevitably get put into special readiness units that can't be easily expanded in wartime or allow for the whole military practice for it. Instead you sort of have a semi-stable continuum of an air force that can't be too rapidly scaled up relative to overall size. It's quite sad the USA can't compete with the UAE or American Airlines in paychecks for retention of good personnel. Oof ouch my pilots and ground crews quality.

[The Grand World Order]

The "diversity hire of the US" is exactly why the Arabian air forces are so good, at least in peacetime. They're sapping the same resource pool that the USAF, US Marines, etc. need to function: capable maintainers and good NCO cadres. What few cadres and good maintenance units the US DOD has inevitably get put into special readiness units that can't be easily expanded in wartime or allow for the whole military practice for it. Instead you sort of have a semi-stable continuum of an air force that can't be too rapidly scaled up relative to overall size. It's quite sad the USA can't compete with the UAE or American Airlines in paychecks for retention of good personnel. Oof ouch my pilots and ground crews quality.

Same issue as most skilled positions, really. I'm a SIGINT operator with SOF experience that's now a contractor getting paid more than my former CO. The military can't pay me nearly as much, send me to actually do the job I joined to do, refrain from treating me like shit for five minutes, or trust me with a toaster in my condemned living quarters, so why stay in?

[Hurtful Thoughts]

I mean if you are buying American gear, being trained by the Americans, and paying Americans to fix your equipment, you can't really say that your air force is all that great. Rather your Air force is a diversity hire of the US.

See previous statement, if you are willing/able to outsource a lot of the work you can get good pilots but it isn't really a winning strategy for your entire national military and requires you not piss of the guy giving you all the help.

The "diversity hire of the US" is exactly why the Arabian air forces are so good, at least in peacetime. They're sapping the same resource pool that the USAF, US Marines, etc. need to function: capable maintainers and good NCO cadres. What few cadres and good maintenance units the US DOD has inevitably get put into special readiness units that can't be easily expanded in wartime or allow for the whole military practice for it. Instead you sort of have a semi-stable continuum of an air force that can't be too rapidly scaled up relative to overall size. It's quite sad the USA can't compete with the UAE or American Airlines in paychecks for retention of good personnel. Oof ouch my pilots and ground crews quality.

Still, my point stands that UAE just lost 10% of its air combat arm over the past 2 years due solely to maintenance issues.

To be on that level of attrition USAF would need to start crashing 500 F-16s per year, every year.

[Gallia-]

It doesn't really require a mega think to realize that an air force which has about a half to two thirds of its aircraft available at one point is worse maintained than one that has about four fifths or five sixths of its aircraft available. The USAF is just really big so I guess it masks its crippling maintenance and manpower problems with sheer size. The UAE has like 250 planes and maybe 180-200 of those are available at any point. The USAF has like 3,000 planes with maybe 1,800-2,100 available at any one point, more or less. It's a couple percentage points off but the UAE probably flies more per pilot since they can afford that, while the USAF can barely afford to fund its pensions I guess.

Obviously the UAE one is better maintained but it's irrelevant because the USAF can just stomp it dead so it doesn't matter much. This changes as air forces get closer in absolute size tho.

It's more telling the USAF is considering abandoning Predator UAS entirely because it lost like 4 to Houthis in some pickup trucks, while I don't think the UAE getting a few helicopters shot down by random machine guns or pickup truck MANPADS is thinking helicopters are useless. Neither is the US Army. Maybe because they know how to maintain them. Maybe the US Army can buy the USAF's Predators and turn them into MTI monitors or something, but I doubt it will be allowed.

[The Grand World Order]

To be on that level of attrition USAF would need to start crashing 500 F-16s per year, every year.

return of the Carolina Lawn Dart

[Triplebaconation]

Still, my point stands that UAE just lost 10% of its air combat arm over the past 2 years due solely to maintenance issues.

To be on that level of attrition USAF would need to start crashing 500 F-16s per year, every year.

I think I see what the problem is.

[Gallia-]

It takes 50,000 M72 LAWs to kill a single T-55 and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition needs to be expended in a firefight to kill a single Afghan insurgent.

[The Manticoran Empire]

The "diversity hire of the US" is exactly why the Arabian air forces are so good, at least in peacetime. They're sapping the same resource pool that the USAF, US Marines, etc. need to function: capable maintainers and good NCO cadres. What few cadres and good maintenance units the US DOD has inevitably get put into special readiness units that can't be easily expanded in wartime or allow for the whole military practice for it. Instead you sort of have a semi-stable continuum of an air force that can't be too rapidly scaled up relative to overall size. It's quite sad the USA can't compete with the UAE or American Airlines in paychecks for retention of good personnel. Oof ouch my pilots and ground crews quality.

Still, my point stands that UAE just lost 10% of its air combat arm over the past 2 years due solely to maintenance issues.

To be on that level of attrition USAF would need to start crashing 500 F-16s per year, every year.

Considering that there are only 1,078 F-16s in the US Air Force, that's rather hyperbolic.

[Hurtful Thoughts]

Still, my point stands that UAE just lost 10% of its air combat arm over the past 2 years due solely to maintenance issues.

To be on that level of attrition USAF would need to start crashing 500 F-16s per year, every year.

Considering that there are only 1,078 F-16s in the US Air Force, that's rather hyperbolic.

A bit, but that's largely because I'm just lumping all losses across all frames into a single airframe.

Even then it's a little excessive, although losing between 100 and 200 F-16s per year would be quite a loss.

A similar hyperbole would've been losing 100 A-10s per year due to lack of repairs.

[Triplebaconation]

who needs real numbers when you have hyperbole

A few aircraft lost in a combat zone, some with disputed causes - nowhere near 10% of the UAEAF's combat strength.

"Technical fault" can mean anything from someone forgot to bolt the engine in to a sensor stopped unexpectedly to nobody wants the public to think the Sheikh's cousin's nephew martyred himself flying directly into the ground.

A minority of equipment failures are due to maintenance problems - this is probably why the UAE is losing fairly new aircraft when you'd expect systemic maintenance issues to hit the oldest planes the hardest.

I think a lot of people are misled by commercial aviation statistics into thinking flying is safer than it really is.

[Cossack Peoples]

How are SLCMs guided to their targets (ship-borne, for example)? Of course, I know about their inertial guidance system and terminal guidance but what I am asking is how does the submarine cue the missile onto its target while submerged, then update it via data link?

[The Corparation]

How are SLCMs guided to their targets (ship-borne, for example)? Of course, I know about their inertial guidance system and terminal guidance but what I am asking is how does the submarine cue the missile onto its target while submerged, then update it via data link?

SLCMs are typically fire and forget. The sub knows where it is and where the target is. It tells the missile this and the missile takes it from there. There's no need for the sub to establish a data link with the missile post launch. There's also not really anything the sub could tell the missile after launch. The sub has no direct means of tracking the missile and the sub likely lacks any new information on the target to give the missile that would be of any use. The sub can't really tell the missile anything the missile couldn't figure out on its own once it's been launched.

If you do throw a data link onto a sub launched missile that link is most likely going to be used to talk to something other than the sub in order to get its mid-course updates.

[New Vihenia]

How are SLCMs guided to their targets (ship-borne, for example)? Of course, I know about their inertial guidance system and terminal guidance but what I am asking is how does the submarine cue the missile onto its target while submerged, then update it via data link?

If you live in mid- 50's to late 60's. You will have the submarine to surface, launch and do this

[Champagne Socialist Sharifistan]

Is paying AA artillery officers more than most other types of officers a bad idea?

[The Dolphin Isles]

Why do they get to have fun with the daka and get better pay?