One of the most acrimonious poast arguments I ever had was about how utterly retarded the US gov was to not procure lightweight coin fighters throughout the GWOT phase. The majority of their patrolling could have been performed by lighter, smaller, more efficient aircraft in order to keep us from burning through our expensive airframes to shoot at pashtun tribesmen once a week.

There were attempts, at least. The USAF wanted to get some tucanos, but the faggots at textron threw hissy fits and lawsuits about how they couldn’t pick an Embraer aircraft…that was already in use, production, etc. They wanted the gov to springboard their T-6 attack variant…which they didn’t design to begin with. It’s a licensed swiss pilatus, so not too “american” anyways.

Had we run a bunch of these, then we wouldn’t be fussing around with new production eagles and 20,000 airframes getting spinal surgery - they’d be barely hitting their original life limits today