- Many people have come here based on this proposal for acquiring an AT-6 aircraft for counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other places like the Philippines. There have been some of our readers including some friends and colleages, who have looked at the brief and said, essentially, great concept, no requirement. By requirement, that is the document that says I need 400 widget x’s and they will compete for funds against the US Army’s Future Combat System, or Navy Littoral Combat Ships, or unicorns for the DC mall.
- Well, we don’t have a published document that says the US military needs a COIN aircraft but everyone knows we are in the business of helping the Iraqis and Afghans get their militaries up to speed and the sooner they are, the quicker we reduce our forces. There are a few documents posted or linked on our project page for the AT-6 here, but here’s yet another excellent document to help build the case for COIN aircraft.
- H/T to our friends at Small Wars Journal page here, Major David L. Peeler, Jr. wrote a paper titled “A Method & Estimates for Counterinsurgency Aircraft Procurement” for Small Wars Journal outlining the budgetary case for buying 36 COIN aircraft, with his two potential aircraft being the Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 or the Stavatti aircraft for COIN operations. The T-6 is in service and in production but the Stavatti appears to be a series of designs, not at all sure how far they have progressed. Major Peeler (according to his biography in his paper) is a serious Air Force budget analyst and commander of the 354th Comptroller Squadron.
- For pure COIN enthusiasts who like historical monographs or descriptions of operations, his paper is pretty stale but for those that are in the business of justifying military programs, this is red meat. The inside baseball nature of analyzing costs associated with buying and deploying weapons systems can be very confusing, but in the end, my read of this paper is that it is really good work and should be used by anyone trying to make the case for acquiring COIN aircraft. Interestingly the number of aircraft Major Peeler worked up the case for is 36, hmmm, in our paper we recommended 20 AT-6’s for Iraq or Afghanistan, 10 for the PI , which leaves 6 for training, sounds like a great number to me.
OK, CENTCOM, PACOM, and SOCOM personnel, what are you waiting for? Get busy!