I read on here a few days back about close air support, combat in afghanistan, etc. and the conversation came up to how the american-specter gunships would provide the best air-ground coverage.

Anyways, when things involving the airforce like this come up, i occasionally go and bullshit with the local military personal that show up at cadets every tuesday from the local military bases. Anyways, this time around one of the officers said it would be "nice" to have 8-10 of the bloody things.

so, the debate; would Canada ever purchase gunships, and in those kinda of numbers? Or is it another pipedream of the local military personell that is to be shelved? the likes of which include Canada buying B-2's and picking up the YF-23 program where the US left off.

   

The money we spend on them would be better invested in more tanks. Effective? Yes, but the platform is not state of the art. It excels at ground superiority when air superiority is guaranteed and the surface to air threat is weak. That is the current situation we face in Afghanistan and it plays into all of the strengths of the Spectre. However, overspecialization is a weakness and we will need to do more. As it stands the US has it, why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?

   

Converting a C-130 into a gunship isn't such a big deal so long as you're just sticking the 40mm and 25mm chain guns out the port side. If you stick a 105mm up the tailpipe then you have to do a lot of serious work on the airframe and that gets pricey.

But adding mini guns or similar small caliber machine guns to one of Canada's existing cargo planes would be an economical way to make a nice gunship - and at not a lot of cost as Canada will likely be able to buy a couple used C-130's from the US for this purpose as we retire them for the C17.

   

I like the idea of conversion but the age of the airframes leaves that option dubious at best with our current fleet of transports. Besides, we need them for the transport they are doing already. It could be done with a scaled down version and it would be a feasible addition to our current combined arms tactics. So picking up a few and up arming them from the US would be a good buy.