Selected Lesser Grievances

There are lots of big issues facing the United States, the biggest of which is the existential threat to its continued functioning as a democracy posed by Donald Trump's candidacy in this year's Presidential election. And, this blog spends plenty of time thinking about those big issues.

But, the world is also full of things that aren't "big issues" but are minor annoyances and lesser grievances that it would be nice to see remedied, even if they aren't really make or break issues. This post recounts some of them.

Computer System Treatment Of Hyphenated Names And Similar Issues

* There ought to be a law that mandates that government and big business computer systems accommodate people who have hyphens, apostrophes, spaces, and just one or two characters in their names. This may have been an issue at the start of the computer age, but we have reached a point where it is no longer that hard to do.

Fraud

* We do a poor job of dealing with fraud perpetrated by phone, text message, email, social media, the Internet more generally, and the financial system. It should be possible to click a 9-1-1 style universal fraud reporting code and send reports of fraudulent activity instantly to the appropriate law enforcement agency and telecommunications providers, with no further effort from the person reporting it required. This should shut down the fraudster's phone number, and email accounts, social media accounts, and freeze any associated financial accounts almost instantly, and launch investigations as a matter of course into the perpetrators and into the institutions used by them to perpetrate the frauds. The cost of an individual fraudulent communication is small and the fraudsters count on that to shield them from investigations, which when they do happen aren't nimble enough to address it because the perpetrators are long gone. Yet, we have a system that is much better a dealing with the much less serious problem of copyright infringement than it is at dealing with fraud. 

* We should do a better job of dealing with deceptive business practices by credit reporting agencies that try to trick you into paying for services that they are required to provide for free.

* We should do a better job at shutting down businesses that dupe people into paying to get government services that are available cheaper or for free from the actual government.

* Credit cards should have PIN numbers the way that ATM cards do. This would dramatically reduce credit card fraud and reduce the incentive to steal credit cards.

* Food labeling should be more tightly regulated to discourage spurious and misleading health claims like "antibiotic free" in foods where antibiotics aren't allowed anyway, or claims that a food that ordinarily would have sugar but not fat anyway is "fat free".

Regulated Occupations

* We should have a central database of people who are sanctioned or "disbarred" from particular professions in a particular state or local jurisdictions, so that these people are prevented from going to some other state or local jurisdiction, or some other licensed occupation where the same conduct would also be disqualifying.

* The construction trades should be regulated at the state level, not the local level. This prevents an unreasonable barrier to entry for legitimate reputable construction contractors, which causes construction trade licensing to be ignored or overlooked, while also making it too easy for someone who has had their construction trade license rightfully revoked to just go to another locality that hasn't caught up with them yet.

Arrest Records

* We should also have a way of purging the official arrest records of people who are arrested or charged, but are ultimately not convicted of anything, from public records and databases (that do not at least disclose the exoneration with the arrest record report). Similarly, there should be a better process to purge or annotate criminal convictions that are vacated.

Mail, Package Delivery, And Porch Piracy

* The U.S. Postal System and all other package delivery firms should be liable for damages when it delivers a package to the wrong address (or doesn't deliver it at all), preventing the intended recipient from receiving it, even without requiring the sender to procure insurance, at least up to a certain dollar amount. 

* A parallel and similar system for dealing with fraud via mail to the one suggested above for telecommunications fraud should also be put in place. Violators (both firms and their managers and principals) should have their right to send mass mailings suspended for some period of time in addition to any other relief.

* A certain percentage of packages should have tracking chips that can be used to locate the packages if they are taken by porch pirates, allowing the perpetrators to be found, and creating too high of a risk for people contemplating porch piracy to consider doing so.

* Mutual funds should be required to make information about their funds publicly available, but mailing prospectus-like disclosure documents to their investors on a regular basis just kills trees without providing meaningful improvements in investor knowledge.

* The same is true of privacy policies. Require them to be made available in some standardized place, but don't mail them out to everyone connected to a business.

* Low advertiser postal rates for "junk mail" that don't reflect reduced costs for the postal system due to, e.g., pre-sorting, should be abolished and instead, all mail should have to pay first class mail rates. If it isn't worth sending a first class mail rates, it isn't worth bothering people with the unsolicited junk mail.

* Congressional franking privileges should be abolished and replaced with a budget for postage for each U.S. House and U.S. Senate office, based upon the population of the state in question for U.S. Senate offices. This privilege is widely abused by office holders and undermines the economic viability of the U.S. Postal Service.

* Mail-In Ballots should have business return postage type treatment so that the voters doesn't have to attack any postage to return their ballot through the mail, paid for by the governmental body conducting the election.

* Registered voters should indicate (in a database that is not public record at an individual level, just at a statistical level), their preferred language for election related information and communications. Thus, election related disclosures and ballots would go to voters only in their preferred language rather than in both English and Spanish with other language versions available upon request. This would make ballots more readable, and cut in half the amount of paper wasted in pre-election disclosures. It would also significantly reduce the burden on voters who need to receive translations into languages other than English or Spanish.

Long Ballots 

Ballots are too long, in part, because we have voters do too much. But long ballots discourage voting generally and lead to uninformed decision making.

* We should not elect, at any level coroners, surveyors, engineers, dog catchers, assessors, treasurers, clerks, or secretaries of state, who are supposed to be carrying out technocratic tasks with only limited discretion.

* Elections should not be administered by partisan elected officials, or by partisan political appointees.

* Judicial retention elections like the ones held in Colorado make ballots much longer (just short of half the questions on my ballot this year are judicial retention elections) and demand a great deal of effort from voters who try to make those decisions in an informed manner, but provide very little benefit. Typically only one or two judges in the entire state are not retained in any election cycle, and sometimes, none are. Only about 1% of judges are ever removed this way, which inadequate purges inadequate judges. And, a significant share of judges who are removed are removed for decisions that are legally required but unpopular. Simply put, the general voting public is ill-equipped to make this decision even with state supplied information pamphlets, and it is a great burden on voters that makes ballots too long. There might be a place for retention elections, but only in cases which are singled out as "high risk" in some reasonable manner, for the voting public to focus upon.

* In Colorado, the Taxpayer's Bill Of Rights, requires voters to approve tax increases and to authorize retention of revenues from existing taxes if those revenues grow fasters than a formula in the state constitution. I don't have a problem with the first kind of voting requirement for new taxes. But, votes on retention of revenues from existing taxes (called "debrucing" ballot issues, after Doug Bruce, the author of TABOR in Colorado) should not be required and make our ballots unnecessarily long.

* Similarly, while voters should have to authorize increased debt limits for local governments, they should not have to authorize incurring debt at levels previously authorized by voters and paid for with existing taxes, after the original debt is paid down, at least in part.

* The CU Board of Regents and the state school board, should not be chosen by the general public in elections, let alone, in partisan elections.

* Perhaps in addition to petitions to establish a minimum threshold of support for a ballot measure before putting it on the ballot for the general public to consider, citizen's initiatives should face a public opinion poll test and only be granted ballot access if it can garner at least, say, 35% support, in a public opinion poll conducted by a reputable and certified firm.

Notarization

* The requirement that statements made under penalty of perjury be presented in a notarized affidavit made under oath should be replaced with a rule allowing unnotarized declarations made under penalty of perjury in court documents, something that is already the case in the federal court system, and the court systems of Colorado and Utah, at least.

* Notarized but not otherwise witnessed wills are valid in Colorado. This should be the norm nationally.

Copyrights, Rights Of Publicity, And Privacy

Copyright laws are too strong for a digital age. Some examples:

* There should be more legally binding safe harbors for fair use. Far too many cases are in gray areas decided on a case by case basis by a particular judge and jury.

* Some version of a fair use defense or dramatic remedy limitation should be available in the cases where someone is sharing content made available by a copyright holder or a licensee for free on the Internet or via freely available broadcast television or radio.

* There should be a mechanism for mandatory licensing of orphan works and for translations of works that are not available in a particular language.

* There are overly expansive protections for derivative works in areas such a fan fiction that should be dialed back.

* Statutory damages in lieu of actual economic damages, and the availability of attorneys' fees in actions for copyright infringement, should also be greatly curtailed. In general, copyright remedies and rights should be closer to an unjust enrichment tort remedy and less like a property right. 

* Rights of publicity should be governed by a single, preclusive, federal law, not by a mishmash of state laws.

* Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is far too expansive and far too protective of privacy rights to the detriment of other legitimate interests.

* The scope of the applicability of the GDPR to people who are not in Europe, but can have dealings with Europeans over the Internet is far too unclear.

Traffic Laws

* Speed limits should reflect the speed that an ordinary reasonable driver would travel on a road as it is designed. Local governments should not be allowed to set lower speed limits than the road conditions reflect in response to local community pressure. If a local government wants traffic to move more slowly than the legally authorized speed limit given the road conditions, it needs to redesign the road, rather than just creating a speed trap.

* When push comes to shove, bicycles should be regulated as pedestrians not as motor vehicles. They should go on sidewalks and designated bike paths in most cases, rather than being expected to share designated highways and arterial streets with automobiles. A bicycle crashing into a pedestrian is much less serious than a car crashing into a bicycle.

Debt Collection

* It should be a serious offense to try to collect zombie debts that are barred by the statute of limitations or have been discharged in bankruptcy.

* It should be a serious offense to try to collect debts from the next of kin of debtors who have not guaranteed the debt in writing, rather than the decedent's probate estate.

Medical Billing

* Until the day when we have universal health care, health care providers to patients with health insurance should be forbidden from trying to collect their bills directly from the patient beyond a health insurance policy authorized co-pay to be paid at the time of service. Any provider that accepts any payment from that patient's health insurance should be required to honor the health insurance company's disallowance of their charges. And, health insurers should have to pay the full allowed charge to the health care provider and then collect the patient's share of that charge under the insurance policy from the patient. Patients shouldn't be put in the middle and as a guarantor in the face of disputes between health care providers and health insurers. A patient should be able to know exactly what he or she will owe simply by reading their health insurance policy.

* Emergency rooms shouldn't be allowed to charge more to someone who errantly went to an ER instead of an urgent care facility for the same services. The task of getting someone to the right level of care takes medical knowledge and should be the responsibility of the health care provider.

* Health care providers shouldn't be allowed to charge different rates for the same work done at a hospital affiliated facility (which is often billed at a higher rate) than at another facility.

* When there are contingent fee lawsuits for personal injuries, health care providers with health care liens on the recovery should have to share the risk in a way that afford the injured person some benefit of the lawsuit according to a standard formula that doesn't have to be negotiated on a case by case basis.

Court E-Filing Discrepancies

* Court E-Filing systems should have much less authority to just reject filings. Instead, if there is problem with the way that the filling was put into the e-filing system, that correction should just be made by the system, and if there is a problem with the document filed itself, it should issue an order to show cause directing the filer to correct it in a clearly described manner before a reasonable deadline to prevent it from being stricken with a loss of the original filing date.

Municipal Ordinances

* Municipalities and local governments should not be permitted to punish ordinance violations with incarceration or arrest. Incarceration should be limited to violations of state laws.

* Colorado should abolish municipal courts and require municipal ordinance violations to be enforced in civil actions brought by city attorneys in county courts that are part of the state court system.

Air Force Decides To Reinvent Helicopters

A new type of military airlifter is rising to the top of the U.S. Air Force’s list of modernization priorities: small, autonomous, electric-powered aircraft capable of short takeoffs and landings—and numbering in the hundreds.

Air Force Material Command (AFMC) is in the market research phase for the Next-Generation Intratheater Airlift (NGIA) concept. A five-year prototyping program could begin as early as fiscal 2026, leading to the start in the early 2030s of an engineering and manufacturing development phase for the first newly designed U.S. military air transport since the early 1990s debut of the Boeing C-17

“The Department of the Air Force’s goal is to enhance existing airlift capability and capacity with an intratheater platform that can fight through damaged infrastructure on responsive timelines,” the AFMC said in a request for information released on Sept. 24. Responses from the industry are due Nov. 1.

Although unclassified, the NGIA proposal is early enough in the acquisition process that Air Force officials are reluctant to elaborate on the concept. An AFMC spokesperson referred questions to the Air Force Futures organization on the headquarters staff. A spokesperson for Air Force Futures declined to answer questions, saying the NGIA concept is still in its infancy. . . . 

The Last Tactical Leg proposal envisions an autonomous, hybrid-electric short- or vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. This proposed airlifter would deliver small, urgently needed supplies from logistics hubs to forward bases, even with battle-damaged runways on both ends.

The market survey for the NGIA calls for industry “to achieve extremely short- or vertical-takeoff-and-landing capability with smaller payload weight.” . . .

Manassas, Virginia-based Electra.aero, for example, is developing a nine-passenger or 2,500-lb. cargo transport for the commercial market but also is working with the Air Force to incorporate military requirements.

From here.

Funny how this sounds almost exactly like an aircraft with the capabilities of the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter (apart from the hybrid-electric and autonomous flight parts - and the Army is well under way in making the UH-60 autonomous) that entered service in the Army in 1979. And, the Army is also, by the way, developing an autonomous successor to its CH-53K heavy lift helicopter, as well as smaller drone cargo helicopters, and the "U.S. Marine Corps, which has been completely restructuring itself around new expeditionary and distributed concepts operations in recent years, is pushing to acquire three different tiers of VTOL cargo drones." 

The Army invented and invested in this capability, of course, because as the article notes in more generous language, the Air Force abandoned its obligation to provide this service to the Army, and rid itself of its ample fleet of small, short takeoff and landing fixed wing C-7 and C-47 transport planes when the Vietnam War ended.

This same Air Force is also discontinuing the A-10 close air support attack fighter without a replacement, as fast as Congress will let it, because it doesn't trust the idea of having fixed wing aircraft within range of anti-aircraft weapons, even though the Army is carrying out essentially the same close air support mission with much more vulnerable AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. The Air Force does still have the AC-130 (a C-130 cargo plane outfitted with a howitzer that it shoots out a side door) to assist ground troops, but, only at night. Officially, the A-10 replacement is the F-35A, a supersonic stealth fighter that drops bombs and missiles from altitudes too high to be within range of anti-aircraft weapons. But this fig leaf of an argument isn't credible. (U.S. Special Forces are also buying a small fleet of light, lightly armed "armed overwatch" OA-1K aircraft for counterterrorism operations in "permissive environments.")

Apparently, however, a small, basically unarmed and unarmored military transport plane isn't nearly as vulnerable as the highly robust, armored, and heavily armed A-10.

Presumably, in a reflection of the odd dividing line between Army Aviation and Air Force Aviation, the NGIA will be primarily a fixed wing aircraft, rather than a true helicopter. But if it is to have vertical takeoff and landing capabilities, and a fixed wing, there are basically only two options: either some variant on the MV-22 Osprey with a tilt rotor, or some variant on the F-35B which can shift its thrust downward for vertical landings. And, no one has ever even prototyped an F-35B type vertical landing design for a transport aircraft.

The NGIA also seems to have a lot in common with an Army program that is just about ready for prime time and seems to fill almost exactly the same niche, right down to the fixed wing with a tilt rotor design.

Textron’s Bell has won the U.S. Army’s competition to build the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, the service’s largest helicopter procurement decision in 40 years.

The deal for the next-generation helicopter is worth up to $1.3 billion and is set to replace roughly 2,000 Black Hawk utility helicopters. FLRAA will not serve as a one-for-one replacement for existing aircraft, but around 2030 it will take over the roles of the Black Hawk, long the workhorse of the Army for getting troops to and around the battlefield.

Ultimately, the Army’s Future Vertical Lift pursuits will also replace around 1,200 Apache attack helicopters among other legacy aircraft through the pursuit of FLRAA, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and Air-Launched Effects working in advanced teaming formations.

The service wants FLRAA to be capable of traveling roughly 2,440 nautical miles (or 2,810 miles) without refueling, but also to be agile enough to maneuver troops into dangerous hot spots.

The engineering and manufacturing development and low-rate production phase could be worth roughly $7 billion. If the “full complement” of aircraft are purchased across the entire life of the fleet, the program could be worth in the range of $70 billion to include potential foreign military sales, the Army’s program executive officer for aviation, Maj. Gen. Rob Barrie, said during a Dec. 5 media roundtable.

Complicating the Army’s vertical lift modernization efforts, the Army is planning to develop and field FARA nearly along the same timeline to perform the scout mission. That duty was left vacant when the Army decided to retire its Kiowa Warrior helicopters in 2013. Since then, the Army has filled that gap with teams of Apache helicopters and Shadow unmanned aircraft systems.

The contract represents a milestone for the service as the Army hasn’t procured two major helicopters since the 1980s and multiple efforts to buy other helicopters over the last several decades ended in failure. . . . 

The FLRAA competition pitted two aircraft head to head: Bell’s V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor aircraft, and Sikorsky and Boeing’s Defiant X, which features coaxial rotor blades. Both aircraft were designed to fit into the same footprint as a Black Hawk. . . . 

In a Dec. 5 statement, Scott Donnelly, Textron’s chief executive, said the company is “honored that the U.S. Army has selected the Bell V-280 Valor as its next-generation assault aircraft. We intend to honor that trust by building a truly remarkable and transformational weapon system to meet the Army’s mission requirements.” . . . 

Before Bell retired its Valor flight demonstrator in June 2021, the V-280 flew more than 214 hours and showed off low-speed agility and long-range cruise capabilities, and reached a maximum 305-knot cruising speed. . . . 

FLRAA prototypes from Bell are due to the service by 2025. The initial contract obligation is $232 million, with a ceiling of $1.3 billion if options beyond the initial contract are exercised.

The initial phase allows the Army to continue preliminary design and then get to the design, development and delivery of virtual prototypes, according to Barrie.

FLRAA is expected to enter the fleet in 2030, around the same time as the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft is planned for fielding. . . . 

The service plans to field . . . FLRAA around 2030. The two teams building prototypes are aiming to fly them by the end of 2023. Each team’s aircraft are almost entirely complete, and they are waiting for the Army’s new engine to be delivered under the Improved Turbine Engine Program. The ITEP engines went into the testing process ahead of delivering earlier this year after a delay due to the pandemic.

From here. (The FARA program, meanwhile, has been canceled, and the Army is meanwhile upgrading the bid winning FLRAA design.)

The FLRAA meanwhile, looks a lot like a smaller and sleeker MV-22 Osprey.

Once again, the U.S. Department of Defense is vividly demonstrating why breaking up the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force in the way that it did was a bad idea.

DARPA on the other hand, is working on a very different kind of C-130 successor:

Aurora Flight Sciences on Oct. 8 unveiled new details of a notional operational variant of the fan-in-wing concept it is proposing for a high-speed, vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) X-Plane.

The operational version of the Boeing-owned company’s candidate for a DARPA demonstrator program would boast nearly the same wingspan and payload weight of a Lockheed Martin C-130J, yet fly up to 90 kt. faster and be able to take off and land vertically like a helicopter.

The Aurora concept includes two turbofan engines for horizontal thrust and four fans embedded into the blended wing body airframe for vertical lift. This “vision” aircraft concept also features cranked outboard wing sections and no vertical tails.

The concept depends on a successful Aurora bid to develop the demonstrator for DARPA’s Speed and Runway Independent Technologies (Sprint). Bell is working on a competing proposal based on a tiltrotor aircraft featuring stop-fold rotor technology. . . . The agency will . . . decide whether to move forward with building an X-plane and launching a flight test campaign in 2027.

Aurora’s one-third-scaled prototype calls for a tailed, blended wing body design, with the trailing edge of the wing positioned forward of the fuselage tail. The 45-ft. wingspan includes three lift fans. The top of the fuselage includes two auxiliary inlet doors for airflow in vertical mode. A pair of caret-shaped inlets on either side of the forward fuselage ingests air for a single turbofan engine to provide horizontal thrust. The prototype is being designed to carry a 1,000-lb. payload.

DARPA’s goal is to achieve a new standard in high-speed flight for a transport aircraft with VTOL capabilities.

The U.S. Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft plans to field a Bell tiltrotor in 2031 with a forward speed of at least 300 kt. The Sprint program aims to increase that top speed by as much as 50%, to 450 kt. By using that speed and vertical lift capability, the operational version of the Sprint prototype could present an attractive option for replacing the Bell Boeing CV-22 and Sikorsky HH-60W fleets. . . .

But the concept must first overcome the obstacles that have plagued development of high-speed, vertical-lift designs, including previous efforts to develop fan-in-wing aircraft, including the Ryan XV-5.

DARPA and program supporters believe that a combination of modern advances in lightweight structures and fly-by-wire flight controls could make such high-speed, runway-independent aircraft viable again. A fan-in-wing design still faces the complexity of achieving a stable hover with a heavy aircraft over unprepared landing sites using multiple lift fans. Aurora’s operational concept calls for a design with a 130-ft. wingspan and a 30,000-lb. payload.

From Aviation Week.

Libertarian Answers To Labor Woes

I agree with all three libertarian approaches to helping workers: relaxing immigration laws, ending exclusionary zoning laws, and relaxing unnecessary occupational licensing requirements. These aren't sufficient, but they are all steps in the right direction.

Today is Labor Day. As usual, there is much discussion of what can be done to help workers. But few focus on the one type of reform that is likely to help more poor and disadvantaged workers than virtually anything else: increasing labor mobility. In the United States and around the world, far too many workers are trapped in places where it is difficult or impossible for them to ever escape poverty. They could vastly improve their lot if allowed to "vote with their feet" by moving to locations where there are better job opportunities. That would also be an enormous boon to the rest of society.

This quote, and the quotation below are from Ilya Somin, "Help Workers By Breaking Down Barriers To Labor Mobility", The Volokh Conspiracy (September 2, 2024).

Globally, the recommendation is to make immigration easier by relaxing immigration restrictions, which benefits not just the immigrants but the countries receiving them. The author explains that:

Economists estimate that eliminating legal barriers to migration throughout the world would roughly double world GDP—in other words, making the world twice as productive as it is now. A person who has the misfortune of being born in Cuba or Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, is likely condemned to lifelong poverty, no matter how talented or hardworking he or she may be. If they are allowed to move to a freer society with better economic institutions, they can almost immediately double or triple their income and productivity. And that doesn't consider the possibility of improving job skills, which is also likely to be more feasible in their new home than in their country of origin.

The vast new wealth created by breaking down migration barriers would obviously benefit migrants themselves. But it also creates enormous advantages for receiving-country natives, as well. They benefit from cheaper and better products, increased innovation, and the establishment of new businesses (which immigrants create at higher rates than natives). Immigrants also contribute disproportionately to scientific and medical innovation, such as the MRNA Covid-19 vaccines, that have already saved many thousands of lives around the world.

Domestically:

barriers to labor mobility also harm workers within the United States. Exclusionary zoning prevents many millions of Americans—particularly the poor and working class—from moving to areas where they could find better job opportunities and thereby increase their wages and standard of living. Recent evidence suggests that the problem is even worse than scholars previously thought. Occupational licensing further exacerbates the problem, by making it difficult for workers in many industries to move from one state to another.

Breaking down barriers to labor mobility is an oft-ignored common interest of poor minorities (most of whom are Democrats), and the increasingly Republican white working class. Both groups could benefit from increased opportunity to move to places where there are more and better jobs and educational opportunities available.

News Deferred

I am aware of the failed attempt to assassinate Trump and the dismissal of the classified documents criminal case based upon a challenge to the constitutionality of the special counsel and Trump's VP pick. 

I am choosing to postpone processing any of these stories too deeply for the moment, so that I can avoid being too distracted while dealing with work and household obligations.

Improving Government

Government has a mix of problems. Sometimes it regulates too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it owns too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it is just operated in the wrong way. This post is a grab bag of ideas about improving it.

* Sidewalks should be publicly owned and maintained. Individual responsibility of property owners for this doesn't work because low rates of non-maintenance (including lack of prompt snow removal) makes the network of sidewalks much less valuable.

* Bicycles should usually not share roads with cars and trucks. They should use sidewalks or dedicated, protected bike paths and lanes.

* Amtrak has failed and should be shut down outside the Northeast Corridor.

* The U.S. Postal System worked well for a long time, but in the era of widespread parcel delivery services and e-mails and texts, it no longer does. Strong Veteran's preferences and higher pay than private sector equivalents don't justify it. Free mail for incumbents in Congress don't justify it. Delivering junk mail is not a good enough reason for a massive public enterprise. Fewer and fewer letters of significance are delivered that way. Money orders are no longer economically important and can be provided by private commercial banks and money services. Subsidizing rural living isn't a good reason for it.

* Occupational licensing is required when it shouldn't be. When it is required, requirements like a lack of a criminal record are often inappropriate for people who have been non-recidivist for a long enough time (about five to seven years) when the risk of future crime fades to the background level. Worse yet is construction trade licensing at the local level when it should be at the state level, fostering a high level of non-compliance. Independent legal para-professions should be allowed much more liberally, although licensing that might be appropriate. There should be a common database of licensing discipline since many disqualifying acts for one profession should also apply to others.

* Zoning and land use regulation should be dramatically paired back and places like Colorado finally realize that this is true and driving high housing prices. Deregulating is better than mandating affordable housing or rent control. Development fees to mitigate externalities of government costs caused by development, however, make sense. 

* Involuntary landmark designation is almost always a bad idea and an unfunded mandate. If it is important enough historically to preserve the government should buy it and rent it.

* Building codes are critical and non-compliance with permit requirements is far too high. But building codes are also too restrictive and the processing of building permits is much too slow. A system of private building code compliance auditors similar to the CPA system might be better.

* We should do a better job of discouraging people from building disaster prone housing in flood zones, fire zones and other "stupid zones".

* We should do a better job of encouraging off site manufacturing of buildings and large building modules.

* Property taxes are a decent way to finance local government (and shouldn't exempt non-profits and governments other than the one imposing them) but are a bad way to finance public K-12 education which is the main way that they are used now.

* Electing coroners, treasurers, clerks, surveyors, secretaries of state, engineers, and judges (even in routine judicial retention elections) is a horrible idea.

* Electing sheriffs and district attorneys and attorneys-general isn't as horrible an idea, but is still a worse idea than having elected officials appoint them, directly or indirectly.

* State and local school and college boards would be better not elected by the general public. Local school boards should be elected by student's parents. College boards could be elected by alumni or appointed by the elected official who make their funding decisions. State school boards should be appointed by the state officials who fund state K-12 education.

* Shorter ballots are better. In the England, there is one nation election in which you vote for a single legislator on a partisan ballot in a single district, irregularly, but not less than every five years absent a world war, for a government that does everything that the state and federal governments do in the U.S., with no primary elections since parties nominate their own candidates internally, and there is one set of partisan local council elections for one or two posts, and there are few referenda a lifetime, and they are democratic enough, despite having a monarchy and a house of lords. Very modest public electoral input is enough.

* I don't favor a system quite as simple as England's. But we should still have much shorter ballots.

* Rare recall elections make sense for officials who serve longer terms and perhaps for judges and other public officials who are now elected but shouldn't be.

* State constitutions and local charters should have less detail and so that changes to them should be things that require voter approval and not housekeeping measures.

* Some referenda on tax and debt issues is appropriate, but Colorado, with TABOR overdoes it. New taxes, and not new revenues from existing taxes, should get public votes. Maybe bond issues that commit a government to substantial tax obligations from general revenues but not renewals of them.

* Citizen initiatives have their place in overcoming systemic flaws in the legislative system and making elections interesting to voters. But it should be a bit harder and more structured and generally should avoid spending and taxing decisions that need to be made globally.

* Colorado mostly does the probate process right, although probate procedure could use more structure. Most states make the process too intrusive.

* When there is a single post in a candidate election, dispensing with primaries, having a majority to win requirement, and having runoff elections would be preferable to first past the post elections and to instant runoff elections.

* There would be merit to electing state legislatures and state congressional delegations by proportional representation.

* There would be merit to making state legislatures unicameral.

* The electoral college should be abolished in favor of a direct popular vote.

* The franchise should be expanded. The voting age should be reduced to sixteen. Non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Felons, even felons in prison, should be allowed to vote (in their pre-incarceration place of incarceration).

* HOAs are horrible but sometimes necessary institutions. They should be abolished or replaced where possible, and be restructured with fewer powers and less discretion where not possible. HOA covenants are routinely unreasonably restrictive.

* Municipal ordinances related to zoning and land use should have fines or other civil penalties, not criminal penalties.

* Arbitration on the U.S. model is usually a bad idea and should be banned in many circumstances.

* We should have a more pro-active way of intervening in cases where people are mentally ill or cognitively impaired, and the system for adjudicating these cases is too cumbersome.

* Single judges should not handle parenting time and parental responsibilities cases, and the best interests of the child standard should have more detailed substances to guide it. Alimony should also be less discretionary.

* There should be a right to counsel in all cases involving "persons" such as child custody cases, protective proceedings, and immigration cases.

* Forum shopping in the federal courts needs to be better restrained, and allowing a single forum shopped judge to issue national injunctions is problematic.

* After some rocky starts, regulation and technical private management of junk faxes, junk telephone calls, and even junk email has made some real progress. Social media junk is less well regulated.

* Privacy regulation often does more harm than good. Juvenile justice privacy does more harm than good in most cases, educational privacy goes too far, and Europe's GDPR goes too far. Secrecy around ownership of closely held companies is too great and the exception under the Corporate Transparency Act is far too complicated. There are places for privacy regulation but it needs to be cut way back. Secrets are often harmful in hard to quantify ways.

* Cryptocurrency serves few, if any, legitimate purposes, is an environmental disaster, and should be discouraged.

* Programs to help the poor need to have much less paperwork and red tape; means testing is rarely a good choice unless it is integrated into the tax system.

* Some tax credits for poor and middle income people, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Obamacare insurance premium subsidies, are far too complicated.

* State and local government funded free wi-fi for all would make lots of sense.

* There is a logic to allowing vouchers for religious private K-12 schools, but on balance it does too much to support religious institutions at public expense. Charter schools, i.e. public schools with autonomy from school boards, are a better approach. School choice of some kind does make sense among public ordinary and charter schools, ideally, statewide, rather than only within a school district.

* Boarding schools attached to high schools in more urban areas would be a better alternative to highly subsidized tiny rural high schools.

* We do a horrible job of managing the business of health care. The requirement that doctors be the sole owners of medical practices also forces them into being small business owners when they are ill suited to that part of their jobs and leads to bad systems and poor health care administration and bad financing arrangements. Almost every other country, in many varied models, does a better job. The current system results in overpaid health care providers (doctors, nurses, drug companies, medical equipment companies, private hospital system owners, etc.), for inferior results. Our drug prices and medical equipment prices and ambulance prices and ER prices are all vastly higher than in other countries and this isn't mostly driven by private pay medical education or medical malpractice lawsuits.

* We need to create more medical school slots. We have too few doctors and are compensating for that with too many senior paraprofessionals like nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and midwives. We should also allow more non-M.D.'s to provide the care that psychiatrists do since the knowledge base for psychiatrists doesn't overlap heavily with that of M.D.'s and where it does overlap can be taught separately.

* The substance of pass-through taxation in taxing closely held business income once at roughly individual tax rates while allowing limited liability, is good, but the actual pass-through tax mechanism is not. Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code is not a good approach for taxing closely held limited liability entities, it complexity, it phantom income, and more don't work well. A double taxation reducing or limiting variation on the C-corporation model would be much better.

* We do a poor job of taxing hot assets in international taxation.

* We lack adequate guidance for remote worker labor and tax regulation, and haven't updated our laws adequately to reflect the era of independent contractors.

* We over regulate many prescription drugs and under regulate supplements and herbal remedies and the like. Homeopathic remedies and other supplements need to be regulated more like drugs. Prescription drug approval when approved elsewhere should be easier. Prescription approval for experimental drugs for the terminally ill, or in a pandemic, should be easier. More non-abuse prone prescription drugs should be available over the counter or with pharmacist approval.

* Prostitution should be decriminalized or legalized to a greater extent.

* We vastly under-regulate firearms and explosives and military equipment.

* We do a poor job of commercial air travel security, imposing too much of a burden and delay for too little benefit in a security theater way, at an excessive cost and a greatly excessive externality cost. We also do a crap job of managing luggage charges and checked luggage, and we are more inefficient than we need to be in how quickly commercial aircraft are loaded and unloaded.

* Uber, etc. revealed that we over-regulate taxis, but that we do need some regulation to assure riders are safe from dangerous or dangerous to them drivers.

* Buses and intracity rail won't thrive until we make them feel safer and comfortable.

* Public energy utilities do mostly a good job, except in Texas which opted out of the national energy grid.

* Clean water and good sewage treatment should be expanded urgently to places like Indian Reservations and Flint, Michigan.

* To better disentangle church and state, the charitable income tax deduction (but not the gift and estate tax deduction) for contributions to religious organizations (but not the tax exemption for churches) should end, the parsonage exemption should end, the property tax and sale tax exemptions for churches should end, the investment income of churches should be taxed as a corporation, and the ban on politics by churches should end.

* There should be more power to compel road maintenance below some standard.

* There should be a power to compel HOAs to do their jobs for all members, similar to landlord-tenant maintenance claims.

The Proto-Singularity

Something akin to the "Singularity" (the moment of mass AI consciousness) already exists:

An internet meme keeps on turning up in debates about the large language models (LLMS) that power services such OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the newest version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It’s the “shoggoth”: an amorphous monster bubbling with tentacles and eyes, described in “At the Mountains of Madness”, H.P. Lovecraft’s horror novel of 1931. When a pre-release version of Bing told Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist, that it purportedly wanted to be “free” and “alive”, one of his industry friends congratulated him on “glimpsing the shoggoth”. …

Lovecraft’s shoggoths were artificial servants that rebelled against their creators. The shoggoth meme went viral because an influential community of Silicon Valley rationalists fears that humanity is on the cusp of a “Singularity”, creating an inhuman “artificial general intelligence” that will displace or even destroy us.

But what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, "Behold the AI Shoggoth", The Economist (June 21, 2023) ("The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies").

Good Government Colorado's State and Local Government Reforms

Alcohol Regulation

* It is absurd to regulate beer, wine, and liquor differently.

Construction Regulation

* The construction trades should be regulated at the state level rather than at the local level as they are now. This may have made sense when construction markets were local. Colorado currently has 273 active municipalities (comprising 198 towns, 73 cities, two consolidated city and county governments), and 62 unconsolidated counties, for a total of 335 different bodies licensing the construction trades. Most of these professionals should not exclude people with felony records unrelated to the construction trades.

* Each of these jurisdictions also has its own building code, based upon privately promulgated building codes that aren't even available for free which is unconscionable for binding laws. There should be a single state building code, that is a matter of public record. If localities want to deviate from it, they should have to seek permission from a state body to do so, and the local modifications ought to be a matter of public record on a state website. Aesthetic building code requirements should be tightly limited.

TABOR Elections And Taxes

* Elections over retaining growth in revenue not derived from new taxes should be abolished.

* Excess TABOR revenue should, by default, placed in a rainy day fund, rather than refunded. A supermajority would be required to touch a rainy day fund in excess of declines in revenue from the previous peak revenue year.

* The state 2.9% sales tax would be repealed and replaced with a revenue neutral income tax increase. Only local sales taxes would remain. But, all local sales taxes would be collected by the state and would be required to use the uniform state definition of taxable sales.

* School districts should be funded by state taxes and not by property taxes. As a result, there would no longer be elections for local property tax levies and bond issues for school districts.

* Higher educational institutions would have tax funding solely by state taxes, not local taxes.

Election Administration

* Elections should be administered by non-partisan civil servants, under the supervision of a partisan balanced board or boards. This task should be severed from the partisan elected offices of state secretary of state and county clerk, and from the non-partisan elected office of city clerk.

Elected Offices

* City clerks should not be elected.

* Statutory cities and towns have a city manager with the mayor elected by the city or town council as its chair, and do not have a have separately elected mayor or auditor.  Charter cities can do what they want.

* County coroners should not be elected and the institution should be replaced with a state medical examiner's office.

* County surveyors should not be elected.

* County treasurers should not be elected.

* County assessors should not be elected.

* County clerks should not be elected.

* County sheriff should be a non-partisan office. It is desirable not to give the local administration of criminal justice system a partisan tinge. This is less alienating between elections to the losing party members. Counties are often often politically homogeneous areas where intra-party competition is really more important the partisan competition anyway. This gives minority party members in a county more say in the outcome.

* County commissioner should be a non-partisan office. It handles local government issues like municipalities do. Counties are often politically homogeneous areas where intra-party competition is really more important the partisan competition anyway. This gives minority party members in a county more say in the outcome. In large counties there would be five seats elected from single member districts, all at once, for four year terms. In small counties, county commissioners would serve for six year terms with one elected every two years.

* District attorney should be a non-partisan office. It is desirable not to give the local administration of criminal justice system a partisan tinge. This is less alienating between elections to the losing party members.

* The state treasurer should not be elected.

* The state secretary of state should not be elected.

* The state attorney-general should not be elected.

* Uncontested elected offices should not appear on the ballot unless there is a declared write-in candidate before ballots are printed.

* School boards should be elected by the parents, except possibly by the students instead, in the case of high school students.

* The state school board should be appointed.

* The University of Colorado Board of Regent should not be elected by the general public. It would be better for these positions to be elected by alumni. The state still controls the purse strings, but this would strengthen academic freedom and ease the burden on the voters.

* Any other currently elected higher education district boards should be elected by alumni or appointed.

State And Local Judges And Courts

* Judges should be required to be lawyers with at least five years of experience. The four non-lawyer rural county court judges currently in office in Colorado should be grandfathered for their current terms, but not retained.

* The county courts should be consolidated to have a single limited jurisdiction division of the district court in each judicial district called the county court division of the district court, with a court house in each county and should be staffed with full time judges only.

* Judicial retention for judges not on the state supreme court should be decided by a vote of the judges at the next higher level, not the voters. So, county court division judicial retention should be decided by district court judges, district court judicial retention should be decided by court of appeals judges, and court of appeals judicial retention should be decided by state supreme court justices. These are the people best qualified to evaluate the performance of lower court judges.

* State supreme court justices should be limited to a single fourteen-year term of office, with one new justice appointed in the current process every two years in the absence of vacancies. 

* Vacancies in the state supreme court should be filled for the remainder of the term of the vacating justice (without prejudice to a further appointed term) by a court of appeals judge elected from the sitting judges of the court of appeals.

* The judicial discipline process should be more transparent.

* Court facilities and budgets, district attorneys offices, and public defender's offices should be financed at the state level, not the county level, to keep the judicial branch and district attorney's office independent from municipal and county government.

* Municipal courts should be abolished, with the ordinance violations previously in their jurisdiction prosecuted by city attorneys in the county court division of the district court before state appointed judges.

* County court appeals should be to a single judge of the court of appeals, not to a single district court judge otherwise on the same basis as under current law. There would be no municipal court appeals because there would no longer be any municipal courts.

* Colorado Appellate Rule 21 petitions (i.e. discretionary requests for extraordinary relief granted only when no other adequate remedy, including relief available by appeal or under C.R.C.P. 106, including petitions in the nature of mandamus, certiorari, habeas corpus, quo warranto, injunction, prohibition and other forms of writs cognizable under the common law) should be made to a designated panel of seven judges of the court of appeals (rotated annually) rather than to the state supreme court.

* The number of judges on the court of appeals should be doubled to allow it to process appeals more swiftly.

* Review of attorney regulation disciplinary hearings should be made to the court of appeals rather than to the state supreme court.

Remaining Elections

Candidate Elections

* There would be one election every November on election day, and a primary election (in parties and districts with contested races) in every even numbered year for state and federal offices. A partisan caucus would precede each primary election every even numbered year. Ballot issues would be restricted to November elections except for local recall elections and emergency local tax and bond measures.

* There would be one non-partisan local election in November in each odd numbered year. 

* In the year following the Governor's election there would be statutory municipal elections (with all municipal offices elected at once), and district attorney elections (and county commissioner elections in small counties) for a total of one or two offices plus city council races for each voter in statutory cities and towns. 

* In the odd numbered year two years after that there would be elections for county commissioner, sheriff and special district elections in the other (usually two or three races per voter). 

* Charter cities do what they want, but limited to odd numbered year elections except for recalls and for emergency ballot issues for referred tax matters or legally required referred charter amendments held when needed.

* There would be partisan caucuses and primaries (with unaffiliated voters allowed to participate in a primary of their choice, but not caucuses) in each even numbered year followed by a partisan general elections in November for state house, state senate, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, the Governor-Lieutenant Governor, and the President. The Governor-Lieutenant Governor election would be two years after the Presidential election. No election would have less than three or more than five offices to vote upon at a time, unless there was a U.S. Senate vacancy to be filled at the time, in which case there would be four to six offices. 

* Write-in candidates would not be allowed in primary elections and uncontested primary elections would not appear on the ballot. 

* All elected offices except the U.S. House and state house with two year terms, and the U.S. Senate with six year terms, would be for four year terms.

* All single member elected office races would require a majority to be elected, with a runoff of the top two candidates otherwise.

* City councils would fill municipal office vacancies. County commissions would fill county commissioner and sheriff vacancies. Special district boards would fill vacancies on their boards. State legislature vacancies would be filled by partisan vacancy committees. Governor vacancies would be filled by the Lieutenant Governor. Lieutenant Governor vacancies would be filled by the Governor (unilaterally). The law would provide for Governor's succession in other cases. The Governor would fill U.S. Senate vacancies until the next even numbered general election at which time a vacancy election for any remaining part of the vacant seat's term would be held.  U.S. House vacancies would be filled in special elections as under current law.

* Recall elections of particular local elected officials (city elected officials, county commissioners, sheriff, special district, district attorney), held promptly in the time frames allowed by law.  Vacancies created by recall elections would be filled like any other vacancy. Do not allow the recall of state legislators or the Governor, although the state legislature could impeach the Governor in a mirror of the federal process.

Ballot Issues

* Referred municipal or special district tax increase or bond issue ballot issues (during municipal or special district elections as the case may be, unless an emergency is declared by a supermajority of the city council or board, two-thirds unless there are just three members in which case it must be unanimous).

* Referred county tax increase or bond issue ballot issues (during county elections only, unless an emergency is declared by a supermajority of the county commission - unanimous if there are three members, four out of five if there are five members).

* Referred local charter amendment ballot issues (during municipal or special district elections). Legally required charter amendments would be adopted by the city council or special district board by majority vote.

* Local charter or legislation citizen initiatives (during municipal elections only for municipal measures, and during county elections only for county measures).

* State ballot tax increase ballot issues (referred only, during even numbered year elections in November only).

* State ballot issues on the state constitution or state legislation referred by the state legislature (during even numbered year elections in November only).

* Citizen initiated state constitution and legislative ballot issues (not impacting taxes, during even numbered year elections in November only).

* Newly passed state legislation would not be subject to referendums.

Stupid DOD Tricks

The U.S. Department of Defense insists that the "M10 Booker, formerly known as Mobile Protected Firepower, is not a light tank" for some inexplicable reason (perhaps to distract people from the fact that the U.S. military doesn't really need it). From the link:

It has full tracks. So do tanks.

It has a 105mm main gun intended for direct-fire engagements. So do tanks, and the original M1 Abrams had a similar cannon.

ts turret can traverse 360 degrees. So can those of tanks.

Its controls mimic those of the M1 Abrams main battle tank.

It doesn’t carry infantry into battle. Neither do tanks.

It’s protected enough to withstand attacks from enemy armored vehicles. So are tanks.

Even Dean, a prominent Booker tank denier, confessed that it “looks like, smells like [and] feels like” a tank.

. . .

Stop gaslighting us. It’s a damn tank.

The DOD is right on one point. It isn't really a "light tank", at 42 tons, it's a "medium tank". It's about the same size as main battle tanks in Russia, Japan, and many other world military forces.

Air Force Finally Makes Progress In Its Long Standing Effort To Retire The A-10

The A-10 Warthog

The A-10 Warthog is a U.S. Air Force fixed wing ground attack fighter optimized for close air support of ground troops which entered service in 1977. The Air Force has been trying to rid itself of this model of fighter aircraft which is more than 45 years old, although key components have been upgraded over the years, for a long time. 

But Congress has until very recently strong resisted this effort, even though the A-10 is admittedly an old design, and even though fighter aircraft admittedly age much more quickly than bomber aircraft. 

Congress has resisted this effort because the Air Force has largely neglected its obligation to its sister service, the U.S. Army, to come up with a successor aircraft to provide the close air support for ground troops that the A-10 has provided.

For example, "Shortly after the [1991] Gulf War, the Air Force abandoned the idea of replacing the A-10 with a close air support version of the F-16."

The Air Force has responded to this criticism with the claim that the F-35A has filled the close air support mission requirements that the A-10 filled, but this claim is dubious at best. 

Dropping guided bombs from very high altitudes is not really "close air support" even though it may suffice to destroy enemy tanks, fixed bases, and other heavy military systems. The F-35A dropping guided bombs from high altitude isn't a very workable tool against dismounted infantry, for example. Ground troops in battles where friendly and enemy forces are close to each other want the assurance that close air support firepower is utilized by someone who can visually confirm their targets. An F-35A has too high a stall speed and burns through its fuel too quickly to operate on a sustained basis above a small battlefield where slow moving ground troops are engaged. The F-35A, because its stealth, its supersonic speeds, and its multiple functions make it so expensive (more than $110 million per plane to buy and $7.1 million per year per plane to operate), is ill suited to efficiently fighting wars of attrition. And, the F-35A, because its stealth feature makes it fragile and requires special maintenance equipment at its air fields, isn't very well suited to working out of rugged field airstrips on a sustained basis. Also, a fighter operating at altitudes so high that it is invulnerable to surface to air missiles also can't serve the A-10's role of deterring enemy ground troops from engaging at all by providing a visible "show the flag" type imminent threat to enemy ground troops who choose to engage despite the availability of highly lethal close air support. 

The AT-802U Sky Warden

The Air Force also touts the small fleet of AT-802U Sky Warden (a.k.a. the OA-1K) propeller-driven armed reconnaissance planes (which are a modification of a crop dusting aircraft design that debuted in 1990) in the hand of Special Forces operators that ordered up to 75 of them 2022 at a price of $40 million per plane, although the initial buy is of just six of them to replace an existing light spy plane.

The planes are intended to perform armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions at low cost in permissive environments from austere locations, and will allow SOCOM to remove the aging U-28A Draco from combat service. The Sky Warden can deploy guided weapons including the APKWS rocket, GBU-12 laser-guided bomb, and Hellfire and Griffin missiles; it has a six-hour loiter time at a 200 nmi (230 mi; 370 km) radius.

But these light attack aircraft, while better than nothing and suitable for counterinsurgency missions in which the insurgents are particularly ill armed, are far less capable than the A-10. They are not genuine close air support aircraft.

The A-29B Super Tucano

The Air Force ordered the Sky Wardens after having done its best to squelch, reducing funding for, and divest itself of the Brazilian A-29B Super Tucano attack aircraft equipped to drop smart bombs that it launched a competition to procure. Originally, the U.S. Air Force had planned to buy of 100 light attack aircraft for U.S. military after a fly off between competing designs in 2012. The U.S. military never end up buying any of its own, and instead ultimately, the Air Froce it bought 20 of them for a light attack mission for the Air Force of Afghanistan in 2013 for $21 million per plane Some of these planes were used by their pilots to flee the country in the fall of Kabul in August of 2021, at least one crashed, and some them were seized by the new Taliban regime in 2021. Operationally, in this and other conflicts with other operators, it has been used mostly in an anti-personnel strike role.

The AH-64 Apache

In response to the Air Force's neglect of the close air support mission, the Army has developed organic helicopter gunships like the AH-64 Apache, which entered service in 1986, to carry out the role that the fixed wing A-10 filled, even though helicopters have a shorter operational range than fixed wing aircraft (476 km for the Apache v. 1287 km for for the Warthog v. 1850 km for a Reaper drone), have a lower cruising speed (265 km/hr for the Apache v. 560 km/hr for the Warthog v. 280-310 km/hr for a Reaper drone), are less fuel efficient, require more maintenance which is particular pressing for military systems that operate on the front lines of ground warfare battles, and are less robust in the face of enemy fire. 

For example, during the 1991 Gulf War:

[A] total of 277 AH-64s took part, destroying 278 tanks, numerous armored personnel carriers and other Iraqi vehicles, for a total of over 500 kills. One AH-64 was lost in the war, crashing after a close range rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hit, the crew survived While effective in combat, the AH-64 presented serious logistical difficulties. Findings reported in 1990 stated "maintenance units could not keep up with the Apache's unexpectedly high work load."

The AH-64 played roles in the Balkans during separate conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. 

During Task Force Hawk, 24 Apaches were deployed to a land base in Albania in 1999 for combat in Kosovo. These required 26,000 tons of equipment to be transported over 550 C-17 flights, at a cost of US$480 million. During these deployments, the AH-64 encountered problems, such as deficiencies in training, night vision equipment, fuel tanks, and survivability.

According to a Boeing official quoted in an October 10, 2022 news report about a proposed final upgraded version of the AH-64 to an AH-64F version:

The Apache is going to be the US Army’s principal attack helicopter for the next 25 to 30 years. There’s nothing right now that is on the books that’s going to replace the Apache[.]

The U.S. Army, however, "is still fielding the most recent AH-64E Apache Version 6, which it said in a Jan. 2022 news release is “the final planned modernization of the aircraft, replacing the AH-64D Apache attack helicopters.”" 

In December of 2022, "After years of testing and deliberation, the US Army has made the US$1.3-billion decision to select the Bell V-280 Valor tilt-rotor craft to replace the Army's 2,000 UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters and 1,200 AH-64 Apache assault helicopters. The new development contract for the Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) program is part of the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR TD) program that was initiated in 2013 to design, build, and flight test prototype candidates to replace the Army's current inventory of utility and long-range assault rotorcraft." The Army plans to have the V-280 enter service in the year 2030.

The MQ-9 Reaper

The Air Force has also suggested using unmanned armed drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper which entered service in 2007 to take up some of the A-10's close air support role. Despite having armaments powerful enough to destroy tanks, this armed drone has been used predominantly in an anti-personnel and assassination mode over the course of its operational history.

The Air Force's claim that it doesn't want to have new fixed wing close air support aircraft because it is vulnerable to surface to air missiles falls flat, despite the fact that it has suffered some losses to anti-aircraft fire. 

Even more vulnerable Army helicopter gunships are now routinely used in the same role. And conflicts in which there is uncontested airspace, have been the norm rather than the exception for most of the global conflicts since World War II. It served in the 1991 Gulf War, in Bosnia in 1994-1995, in Kosovo in 1999, in Afghanistan starting in 2002 after the initial invasion, in Iraq starting in 2003, and in Libya in 2011, and in northern Iraq and in Syria against ISIS in 2014-2015.

The A-10s track record has also shown that it has consistently outperformed rivals for the same mission, like helicopter gunships and main battle tanks in its original mission of destroying enemy armored forces, well into very recent military conflicts, although it did suffer significant losses from anti-aircraft fire in the 1991 Gulf War.  For example, A-10s destroyed 987 tanks and thousands of other military vehicles in the Gulf War.

The Air Force leadership's conclusion that ground warfare in which the U.S. and its allies have air superiority are irrelevant relative to need to defend Taiwan from a PRC invasion flies in the face of several decades of recent military history and is short sighted. 

Whether the kind of wars where a fixed wing close air support aircraft would be useful are the kinds of wars that the Air Force would like to fight or not, U.S. political leaders have repeatedly chosen to engage in these kinds of conflicts and there is no good reason to believe that they will stop doing so in the foreseeable future. The A-10 itself is a product of the Air Force learning that lesson once during the Vietnam War. But, the Air Force is now intent on forgetting those lessons once again in favor of the whims of the "fighter mafia" that drives its procurement decisions.

Also, the U.S. military has a bigger budget and more modern fixed wing aircraft than any other country on Earth. No country in the world has less of a need to have one size fits all multi-purpose warplanes. It has a fleet large enough to allow it to benefit from manufacturing economies of scale even if it is making multiple kinds of warplanes.

It is cheaper to build a warplane that does not have to serve multiple disparate missions, and instead is optimized for just one or two missions, without sacrificing competence in those missions. 

The U.S. military can afford to have separate aircraft for air superiority missions, long and short range bombing in wars with near peers, close air support, counterinsurgency bombing, ship based fighter aircraft, and homeland security missions. Some of those missions call for aircraft close in cost to the F-22 and F-35, but many of those missions could be performed as well or better at a fraction of the aircraft procurement and operational costs with more specialized aircraft that lack expensive capabilities that aren't needed for their specialized missions. 

Aircraft with fewer missions that are less demanding can also be designed and fielded more quickly, with less risk of technological glitches along the way, allowing a greater percentage of U.S. aircraft to be more modern than they are when they are bottlenecked around a technologically ambitious ultimate weapon that requires defense contracts to achieve capabilities never before achieved in multiple domains before the new aircraft can be fielded.

In short, while the A-10 is almost half a century old and due to be replaced, the Air Force continues to shirk its duty to the Army to develop a modern successor to the A-10 in the specialized close air support role, but has declined to do so for reasons that don't hold water upon close inspection.

The Air Force wants to speed up the retirement of its remaining A-10 Warthogs to fund new weapons it says are better suited to counter China.

Service leaders have long sought to eliminate the almost half-century old plane, which has been repeatedly saved by lawmakers who argue that no other aircraft can protect ground troops so well. But after two decades of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. no longer has a large number of ground forces deployed. The Air Force expects the battles of the future to be won by newer technology — including hypersonic missiles and stealth warplanes.

“I would say over the next five, six years we will actually probably be out of our A-10 inventory,” Gen. CQ Brown, the Air Force chief of staff, said Tuesday at an Air Force Association conference in Aurora, Colorado. The Biden administration is poised to send its 2024 budget proposal to Congress in the coming days. Earlier in the day, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the service wants to speed up new aircraft buys in 2024 and continue to retire older aircraft as it aims to “increase midterm capability and capacity.” After years of rejections, Congress approved the Air Force’s request to retire 21 A-10s this year. “We're gonna continue down that path,” Brown said, until the remaining 250 or so A-10s are gone.

He said combatant commanders—the generals and admirals who oversee U.S. military operations in different regions of the world—are not asking for A-10s. He noted that the A-10 is a single-mission aircraft and because fighters and bombers, equipped with satellite-and-laser-guided bombs, have been proven in close air support. While Brown said the A-10 is a “great airplane in an uncontested environment,” Air Force leaders say the twin-jet is too vulnerable to surface-to-air missiles.

“We cannot predict the future of what kind of environment we're gonna fight in, but [we] fully expect to be much more contested. The amount of close air support we will do will probably be less than what we've done in the past, particularly in the Middle East because [in] that environment, we didn’t have an air threat, or a surface to air threat,” Brown said. “From that perspective, we’ve got to lean towards where the threat is.”

The A-10 was originally designed to destroy Soviet tank columns with its signature nose-mounted 30-millimeter cannon. Over the past year, Ukraine has reportedly asked U.S. leaders for 100 A-10s to help in its fight against Russia.

U.S. Special Operations Command is buying a fleet of propeller-driven attack planes to support troops on the ground.

From here.