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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

Sounds fairly straightforward, but what happens if that business plan changes? If private paramilitary aviation is anything like other private security services, then there’s definitely a market with some pretty deep pockets with questionable motives.

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1) It's enormously expensive and difficult to arm disarmed 4th gen planes. You'd need another extremely expensive military contractor to equip them with (expensive) missiles, rockets, or whatever. Plus, in all likelihood, the defense contractors would refuse, if it did anything to risk federal contracts.

2) These planes (superhornets) are is a wildly inefficient way to arm a paramilitary. These things cost tens of thousands of dollars an hour to fly, are built to fight nation-states, and you can't exactly maintain them on an airstrip in the middle of nowhere. If you want to gun down rebels in the jungle, you'd buy Super Tucanos, for a tenth or less of the cost-per-hour fly time (plus, easier to arm and provision)

Edit: my bad, just regular hornets, not superhornets. read too quickly

1) like the article states, infact these things are not disarmed at all. and yeah federal contracts... Who else was he contracting again currently and what's the purpose of the whole endeavour then (there's definitely more money there except for fleecing the air force...). I would understand allowing such a business when it was a direct front for CIA-CAS (which it very well might be), but just to extend the private contracting business to freaking jets seems borderline crazy

2) well, the company seems to offer the whole package (see the final sections about him storing 80000 HE-rounds for his two dozen hawks). And once the US hegemony over who runs military conflicts on this world goes the way of the dodo, well... I guess you might easily fend of someone like Kenia intervening in your nice cobalt business in congo with a dozen of NATO-grade fighters... And there is definitely a private sector available to secure your bases in a "friendly" third country.

Unless your cobalt mine in the Congo is generating billions in revenue, fending them off with modern combat aircraft is probably going to be a net loss. It's not uncommon to have maintenance costs of $10,000 or more per flight hour (the F-35 is apparently $20,000). A fleet of 46 aircraft flying, say, 8 hours per day is going to cost $110,400,000 per month at a $10,000 flight hour cost.

you won't need the full fleet to fend off any neighboring country – and as I said they offer the whole range now: from small prop-based CAS to state of the art (at least for everyone non-NATO, China or Russia) air superiority.

And I wouldn't really worry about the amount of cash available in such conflicts. In the past it generally was enough for leaders to bribe their way into being accepted citizens of the western hemisphere, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_dos_Santos Now suppose, EU drops any support for the angolan government, she wants back her power: probably easy for her to start a civil war. Some neighbors (Namibia, SA) might step up (like they did in Somalia) to help the government if it holds out the initial 1,2,3 ... weeks. Normally they would have uncontested air superiority. Now Ms. dos Santos asks Mr. K.: "How about 4 of your hornets, I heard they kick ass, do you want some diamonds?" (and yeah, they can easily operate from a number of airfields there, I just counted >20 of more than 2km lengths of asphalt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_Angola). And that is how private contracting basically already works for advisors/spec-ops – great to see that extended to state-of-the-art aircraft.

Really great, good progress, all hail the capital!

Right, but now you're talking about using mercenaries to fight a civil war and vie for power over a sovereign nation. That's much higher stakes than a cobalt mine. Mercenaries in air forces have existed, but usually in the form of hiring pilots and maintenance crews to operate aircraft owned by one of the belligerent nations. This is what occurred in the Eritrean-Ethiopian war. These countries brought up former Soviet aircraft and munitions following the end of the cold war, and also hired ex-soviet pilots and ground crews to operate them. But this is a significant war with hundreds of thousands of combatants on both sides.

ahem, the DR Congo is basically in a state of civil war. And yeah, basically the air superiority is currently held by the nation state and its allies. A private force can turn this easily. Also, the soviet caches have dried up (while I doubt the demand did) and today in most conflict areas, it should be a lot easier to put a box of cash on the table to get a service than import/export a lot of stuff on your own (you need people and control for that).

I think “disarm” here was used in the sense of reloading ammo vs. making the weapon itself usable or not.

as I outlined in the other answer, you don't need a lot of weapons to counter non-NATO/China/Russia-air forces. And I'm sure, a person buying state of the art fighter jets can buy some surplus Sidewinder or Maverick missiles as well...

These seem to be F/A-18A/B models so just regular hornets. Which also tracks with their acquisition since the RAAF is selling off and replacing their aging A/B hornet fleet (the US has already retired theirs, except for the Blue Angels). That said I agree with everything else you said, just wanted to point that detail out.

You would still require a lot of approvals from DoD/ATF etc. to get an A-29 Super Tucano, armed or not. See my earlier comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22837486

My understanding is a F/A-18 would probably cost Mr Kirlin $10k/hr to operate. A Super Hornet actually costs about the same in variable costs per flight hour, as they require less maintenance and are younger in age, than a legacy Hornet. Of course, depreciation on a $70m jet is not cheap, which can only be flown for 8k hours, without a major rebuild.

those aren't super hornets by the way (no civilian would get an authorization to fly a super hornet). They're the A/B, original hornet version, and any superhornet would fly circles around one.

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