Wouldn't it make sense to develop prop driven close air support bombers capable of delivering modern munitions? i mean prop driven aircraft can stay up longer and are quite capable of providing air support in a modern war as proved in vietnam. i think that this would work better against terrorists. you can have airplanes orbiting all the time rihgt were an operation or raid or attack is being conducted. you would always have close air support right at hand. against terrorist you really don't have to worry to much about sams.
The thing of it is (from the perspective of a strike obsessed USAF as currently the only Key West enabled combat fixed wing user), props basically take away your stealth and unless you're talking about a prop/fan/ they also drop your speed at or below 420 knots for ingress.
And it will always be this way so long as the power:weight ratio on the piston or rotary engine remains fairly low. Turboprops get you better power but have about 1/2 to 2/3rds the thirst of a jet engine for fuel and so cost you persistent loiter which is a key element of CAS.
That said, there are good bizjet cores out there which, on a clean airframe, will get you Mach .82-.85 for a 1,000 miles with 2-4hrs of loiter at less than .35 T/Wr. One of them powered the X-45.
Once you remove the senseless 'yank and bank' equation from the formula for EM, (stealth loses all siganture advantage when flat plated) and shift to smart decoys and HPM for most counter missile work, the defensive energy requirements for a 'fighter' class airframe disappear.
Once the jet no longer has to accelerate like a whipped poodle defensively, it no longer pays to treat it as an offensive booster for AAMs as well (turbine propulsion on a missile is the most blatantly ignored element of air warfare now extant).
And that in turn (100+ mile range with second pass attack from a 300lb missile) means you can get out of the closure+closure game of a guaranteed merge and 'dogfighting' which any Air Force worth it's salt is running away from as fast as they can.
Without the need for fighter performance you ARE a bomber (and ISR platform) and for air to mud, the basics against micro target sets are always going to be opportunistic 'by the numbers' to just saturate a given area, based on aperture standoff and expendable as much as extendable sightlines (graze angles may not always favor staying on the safe side of a fenceline but a drone dropping a drone can see things that would otherwise cause an I2).
And once you go for the signature reduction to penetrate. And the time on station to find targets that may only stick their heads up for a few minutes in a given part of the country every other day, you are left with the certainty that a pilot is _the biggest mission detractor of all_.
Because the weight in environmental, escape and control/display systems is easily 1/4 to 1/3rd the empty weight of even the lightest CAS jet (SABA comes to mind) and that will reflect directly on the cruise efficiencies of the jet. Even as fatigue and RTB radius considerations will put a hard limit on how long you can stay, anyway.
If there is a point to a prop CAS airframe it is as a replacement for the attack helicopter in airmobile escort missions. That means enough power to run not just a pusher prop to 350 knots or more. But also a lift fan for VTOL (rolling or pure) and enough payload capacity beyond that to carry both conventional (Hellfire, 70mm FFAR) and fixed wing (GBU-12/38/39/40 and AMRAAM/JDRADM) class CAS munitions.
Along with a dedicated WSO/CPG to run a very sophisticated lookdown sensor suite.
At which point, people like the Marines are gonna look at you like you've lost your mind on cost and insist on the 'full spectrum' capabilities of a jet like the F-35B.
Even though it's not half the interdictor it's big-tank brothers are and if it follows the Harrier, there will be only 6-8 on-deck as a detachment.
The latter number will not improve when CH-53X and MV-22A have to share the space, each with a heavy helicopter footprint but only medium helo lift over extended ranges typical of STOM ops.
The Army thanks it's stars for not having any Osprey in the budget and so have 'no need' for a 25-30 million dollar CAS jet as escort when they can throw away (to trashfire) 30 million dollar AH-64Ds and 15 million dollar RAH-70s instead.
Until and unless you exclude the transport systems, either from the inventory requirements (special=microforces, inapplicable to deep escort missions) or from the terminal area threat environment (not dragging a herd of helos into harms way where they have to be defended), the CAS prop is just as much an inconvenient truth as the admission (airmech = drive to the sound of gunfire) of what you would have to do to stay operationally viable with a small deep-airlift capability if you don't have it available.
Smaller nations in places like Africa and South America (no deckland requirement, much 'empty space/long border' complications) might make a better use of this concept but they will most likely stick with the AT-26 and similar (Tucano/PC-9) conversions.
Which means, for them the real requirement is going to be developing a cooperative network capability so that AMUST/ALERT type cued targeting can be used to swarm-enable a much smaller force of manned platforms attackers armed with very specific (VSM) light-CAS PGMs not likely to be developed outside the U.S.
For U.S. it's lose:lose either way because as soon as such a system becomes popular it will proliferate by cheapness and the heavy metal approach to combined arms and light infantry expeditionary forces as building block constructs will go right out the door.
Each unit will have to be equally protected against top attack UAVs along the lines of the Dominator and _that_ will be monumentally expensive.
Um. There is this nifty thing called an AC-130 gunship. Close air support. 4 turbo prop engines. Armament ranging from 20 mm Gatling guns to 105 mm howitzers. It is not a bomber but if you have one of these circling above a building for 12 hrs until the target exits, and blast the bugger away with no collateral damage. Its good enough.
