In 2005, on a mountain in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, four U.S. Navy SEALs were ambushed while on a mission to kill or capture a Taliban leader. In the ensuing firefight, three of the SEALs were killed, along with 16 other U.S. special operations forces whose Chinook helicopter was shot down while trying to rescue them.
The one SEAL to return from the mission alive, Marcus Luttrell, went on to write Lone Survivor, a book about his experience. While the best-selling book, and later the movie based on it, made the doomed mission famous, less well known is that the tragedy spawned a search for technology that could have helped prevent the loss of life.
Hollywood’s version of battle might conjure up images of advanced aircraft coming to rescue special operations forces. But what troops needed in a place like Afghanistan was a relatively simple armed aircraft that could hit the enemy at close range.
“After that [mission], the Navy started to say, ‘What do we have to do to make sure this never happens again?’” said Taco Gilbert, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general, who worked in the Pentagon at the time of the mission. “As they talked to people involved, the No. 1 request they had was for a light attack aircraft that could be out with them in the forward areas.”
The outcome, according to Gilbert, who now works as a senior vice president for Sierra Nevada Corp., a company offering light attack aircraft, was what in military jargon is called a JUON (pronounced ju-on), short for “joint urgent operational need.” A JUON is a document that spells out something that is needed urgently on the battlefield, within days or weeks.
The Navy wanted a cheap counterinsurgency aircraft for close air support, something that only required taking an existing light propeller-driven aircraft, such as a trainer, and putting weapons on it. In theory, that could be done within months.
Yet, more than a decade later, the U.S. military still doesn’t have a plane that responds to this urgent requirement. Other countries, from the United Arab Emirates to Kenya, have either bought or are looking at buying a counterinsurgency aircraft. Even Afghanistan now has light combat aircraft, courtesy of American taxpayers, while the Pentagon is still trying to figure out what to buy or whether it should buy anything.
One prominent critic of the light combat aircraft idea, the aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia, said the Defense Department shouldn’t go forward with the program at all. “I think sanity will prevail, and it won’t happen,” he said.
That the U.S. military can spend more than a decade trying to address a simple problem is nothing new. After all, the Air Force’s newest air superiority fighter, the stealthy F-22, was first conceived in 1981 amid concerns about a confrontation with the Soviet Union but wasn’t fielded until 2005, nearly 15 years after the Warsaw Pact collapsed. But in that case, the lengthy time was needed to develop the underlying technology, including stealthy features and advanced avionics. Yet various types of light attack aircraft, by contrast, now exist.
Now, 13 years after the ill-fated mission in Afghanistan, the Pentagon may be finally moving forward. The Air Force has conducted the second of two rounds of flight experiments with potential candidates, and lawmakers appear poised to fund the aircraft.
Air Force Gen. James Holmes, the head of Air Combat Command, which is conducting the flight experiments, is aware of how long it has taken to get to this point and the danger of simply giving up.
“Looking back in hindsight, it would have been great if we had put the money into a lower-cost solution to handle this mission set, 15 years ago, 10 years ago,” Holmes said. “But going forward, there’s a tendency, if you’re a military planner, to look forward to the next thing and to say, ‘We’re going to stop doing this.’”
That, he insisted, won’t happen this time.
Even if he’s right, the Defense Department’s failed efforts to buy a relatively simple aircraft have been a tale of competing visions of warfare, congressional interference, and Pentagon indecision. More than a decade later, the question is whether it still even makes sense to buy them.
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