Why the A-6 Intruder Is Still the Best Navy Attack Plane to Grace the Deck of a US Carrier

A-6 Intruders would have been able to deliver far more ordinance for far less cost than the multirole planes we have instead employed.

Commentary

The A-6 Intruder’s last combat missions were flown over Bosnia in 1994, and it was formally retired in 1997. During Operation Desert Storm, Navy A-6E aircraft flew 5,619 sorties striking 2,617 targets. Included in these sorties were 221 air defense suppression attacks using high-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARM).

Since the plane’s retirement, the U.S. Navy has had to rely on multirole aircraft with less range and less payload to deliver strikes on ground targets.

What’s more, given that we have largely been able to achieve air dominance where we have been engaged in active combat operations since the 1990s, over the last 30 years A-6 Intruders would have been able to deliver far more ordinance for far less cost than the multirole planes we employed.

Even the most modern multirole plane, the much heavier and vastly more expensive F-35C, is greatly outclassed by the A-6E Intruder when it comes to sortie generation rates and delivering payload over range. Further, flying the unreliable, gas-guzzling F-35C costs vastly more per flight hour than does the A-6E.

To be more specific, with a combat weapons load of 18,000 pounds, an A-6E Intruder had a combat radius of 867 nautical miles (NM) whereas the full combat load of the F-35 flying in stealth mode is less than one-third that (5,700 pounds) with a combat radius of 600 NM.

So, when using what is arguably its main advantage, its stealth, the F-35C can carry one-third of the weapons two-thirds of the distance of a 1960-era attack plane.

Yes, in “Beast Mode” the F-35C can load up a whole bunch of weapons externally, taking its weapons payload to a whopping 22,000 pounds, but in doing so not only does it lose its stealthiness, but its combat radius also drops by half to a paltry 300 NM. In summary, the lighter, decades-old attack plane absolutely blows away the F-35C in the amount of precision ordinance it can deliver to target at range over any given period of time.

The counterargument is that the F-35C can deliver ordinance into areas where we have not achieved air dominance, whereas the A-6 is much more limited in where it can fly with a reasonable chance of making it back. This is true for many scenarios.

But it is also true that 30 years after development began on the F-35, peer competitors such as China and Russia have developed and deployed air defense systems that can both detect and target stealth fighters such as the F-35, or even the far stealthier F-22. This means that the F-35 will not just be able to waltz into enemy-controlled airspace to deliver ground strikes.

Instead, as has been the case in the past, meticulously planned and routed suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) operations will need to be conducted before airpower can really be brought to bear. In other words, a plane with the kind of limited stealth that an F-35 sports does not have the advantage it would have had 30 years ago when it was designed.

Thus, just as is the case with dedicated attack planes such as the Intruder, all multirole fighters, including the F-35, will rely on extensive, risky, costly, and lengthy SEAD operations when facing peer competitors before they can comfortably attack ground targets.

Of course, any multirole fighter, including the F-35, will be vastly superior to the Intruder when going mano a mano against enemy air superiority or multirole fighters. Hence, we do need aircraft capable of taking the lead in air superiority missions. With that said, the modernized A-6F Intruder II, of which five prototypes were created by upgrading A-6Es, was not only capable of firing the deadly accurate AIM-9 Sidewinder but, because it had a greatly upgraded radar, it could also fire the AIM-120 beyond visual range air-to-air missile.

This by no means means that the A-6F should ever be a primary air defense asset, but given the Navy’s cooperative engagement capability (CEC) that allows planes such as the F-35C to act as forward deployed sensors, A-6Fs acting as missile trucks could have their AIM-120 missiles guided into enemy fighters by the F-35C’s powerful AESA low probability of intercept radar.

Consequently, by taking advantage of the CEC technology, a modernized A-6 Intruder could provide air defense support from the rear. For your information, an A-10 Warthog also carries Sidewinder missiles and, if upgraded to carry longer-range air-to-air missiles and CEC, could likely fulfill a similar role for the U.S. Air Force.

This brings us to the question of the practicality of modernization of the hundreds of A-6 Intruders that were retired, many of which received brand new composite wings shortly before being retired. Modernizing each plane would cost millions, but even at $10 million a pop, they would be a fraction of the cost of any new plane rolling off the assembly line today. And with the kind of upgrades planes such as the F-16, the A-10, and the F-15 have received over the decades, they would bring back an unrefueled long-strike capability that the Navy no longer has.

Surely, such a capable plane with CEC and upgrades to its precision strike capability could prove useful?

The answer is yes, but the practicality is non-existent because as soon as the Navy retired the A-6E Intruders, it began to scrap them. In 2005 there were still 196 A-6Es mothballed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. But in 2017, the Navy eliminated any possibility of bringing back this highly capable airplane by scrapping all but two of the A-6Es.

In the end, the A-6E attack plane, with its excellent stability, was a great example of an aircraft designed to do one thing really well. The Navy clearly knew this, but its enamorment with multirole aircraft, the peace-dividend-driven defense budget cuts that came after the Soviet Union dissolved, and the pressure to send billions of dollars of business to defense contractors for new multirole jets combined to prematurely end the career of an attack plane whose base capabilities have yet to be equaled.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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