What are some good contracts for a mercenary air force to be hired to accomplish, Veeky Forums?

Hostilities are cooling off between two nations, and that's bad for business. During a meeting and public speech by the two heads of state, intercept and replace nation A's planes in the ceremonial joint flyby, then down nation B's ceremonial planes during the flight.

pmctactical.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21647
(This will download a .doc file with a bunch of mission types.):
google.co.nz/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0ahUKEwi7pODJsaHVAhWFyLwKHSY-Dm4QFgg1MAI&url=http://web.deu.edu.tr/atiksu/ana45/Aircraft_mission_roles.doc&usg=AFQjCNFPbXZnEPnEINNOKrIr-m5SwyFp2Q

You must retrieve the message and you must not harm the pigeon
We believe it can be turned around and be made into a mole

Redirect the pigeon via feed dispensers mounted on your hardpoints. Engage in strikes against hunters in the woods who threaten the pigeon.

you'd probably doing dodgy shit that govts want to be seen to have nothing to do with like coups. That or bombing civilians for some dictator.

Arms dealer hasn't been selling any anti-aircraft guns for a while. Go convince people to buy some.

It's a good "starter" mission, and justifies later missions in the same area being more difficult

Kind of silly, though. Flying fighter jets is EXPENSIVE, no way is the profit from a few dozen AA guns enough to cover the cost of hiring the mercenaries.

Drop nerve gas on some random village as part of a false flag operation.

Destroying some nation's super weapon.
It'd involve flying inside gigantic corridors that can fit several planes and shooting at huge missiles or computers.

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More like destroying the super weapons of a secret organization that advocates for the end of national borders
podraced

ACZ isn't the only AC game, user. Pretty sure the Megalith and Chandelier weren't owned by shadowy cabals.

Yes but you weren't mercenaries in 4, 5, or 6. You could do 2 though, and maybe 3?

''mercenary air force'' is not neccessarily only jets, especially if its a starter mission.

>mfw starter mission on rickety Cessnas with rocket pods

Your job is to nail as many Mig-19 as possible.

>What are some good contracts for a mercenary air force to be hired to accomplish, Veeky Forums?

Working as an aggressor unit for a national air force.
Training a fledgling national air force.
Escort missions for international aid.
Flying for a small nation in a small war in Africa.
Flying for a dictator in any MENA country.

>zone 88

He's talking about "Area 88" which was a manga, an OVA, and a series. Also an arcade and SNES/Super FAMICOM game.

- recon enemy forces
- be ready for close air support
- covering fire for extraction of ground based mercenaries
- hired by nation using different aircraft for training purposes

I forgot:

The premise is that a Japanese airline pilot is Shanghai'd by his best friend the night they graduate from airline pilot academy. His best friend enlists him into the mercenary air force of a generic Middle Eastern kingdom bogged down in a war of succession. His best friend then hires a war correspondent/photographer to take a photo of his death so that the protagonist's fiance (the daughter of the president of the airline he was going to fly for) will marry him instead.

I haven't read much of the manga but the OVA and series are very different due to length. IIRC the OVA follows the manga fairly closely as far as plot. The series is longer so some of the plot points from the OVA get fleshed out a bit more though they drop one of the more interesting stories from the OVA (a group of Sub Saharan African pilots are hired to hunt down mercenaries who try to desert).

The mercenaries include (depending on version) a Vietnam veteran pilot who flies an F14 Tomcat, a teenager from North Africa who flies an AV8 Harrier, a Danish pilot who is seemingly invincible and flies an A10 or A4 depending on the version, and a British Royal Air Force pilot who is haunted by the ghosts of his comrades.

>Working as an aggressor unit for a national air force.
Would they really? I mean, might as well use your own, and both get training. Or you can use your old and tired pilots close to retirement to train the younger ones.

Libya
Just Libya
warisboring.com/erik-princes-mercenaries-are-bombing-libya/

You say that, but the US airforce just contracted with Draken International for a professional aggressor gig.

You have been contracted by a warlord in a third world country to provide air support against a rival warlord. The friendly warlord has a pair of HINDs that will not be under your command, but the rival has a rudimentary internal air-defense system consisting of obsolete SAMs. The enemy warlord does not know his rival has contracted fixed-wing assets and lacks early-warning radar.

Your job is to perform SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) missions so that the friendly warlord's helicopters can perform CAS for his ground forces, which are inferior to those of his rival. Your fleet of aircraft consists of F4 Phantoms and a handful of cheap unarmed surveillance drones. You lack the radar-homing bombs to perform a textbook SEAD mission, but you do have PGMs (precision guided munitions, smart bombs).

African nation is about to declare war on another and has a decent sized force of paratroopers. However, their enemies just got given a shiny new air defence system or perhaps it's a foreign detachment with air defence. You're tasked for a single escort/SEAD strike to clear out the enemy AA and make sure nothing happens to the transport aircraft.

All these talk of CAS and air superiority missions. Munitions are expensive and getting shot down is unprofitable. Get something like pic-related and run a priority cargo service for warlords and rebels, where cargo can mean anything from injured soldiers to illegal bio weapons.

>I roll for flying over empty space in in unarmed cargo vehicle
sounds fun user

How do you feel about smuggling cute princesses across hostile airspace

Wew what the hell.
How is that cheaper than just flying their own?

Hiring out to small nations that have the wealth, but either not enough terrain or simply unsuitable for landing strips. Soft sands, super mountainous, etc.

Attacking and sinking merchant vessels of a rival country in international waters while maintaining deniability.

Cargo planes are boring but flying transport helicopters in active combat zones isn't.

>Munitions are expensive and getting shot down is unprofitable.

Which is why you charge accordingly.

This guy fucking gets it.
Could anything be more awesome than running drugs and arms to rebels in SE asian jungles with a ragtag squadron of cold war helis?

>How is that cheaper than just flying their own?

It might not have to be. When it comes to opfor/aggressor units it can be worth bringing in someone who might fly differently than your pilots.

Bombing villages belonging to civilians in a terror attack

I thought Aggressor squadrons already often flew surplus Soviet/Russian planes, and used Soviet/Russian tactics.

Humanitarian Aide, escort a group of doctors/relief workers to an area and protect them. Maybe some faction doesn't want the country to get help or maybe there's still fighting going on.

>the pigeon has it's own experimental jet

>The Madmartigan
Our intel team has a lead on a substantial haul, just waiting for us to acquire it. A first world nation commissioned the hull of an aircraft carrier, the same specification as the world leading navy's latest. It was completed, but an opposition party took power and scrapped it.
We now know that the hull was not only completed, but an active reactor is installed, and the vessel is technically seaworthy.
A series of missions will be needed to acquire skilled personnel, intelligence on where the country's overstretched navy is hiding the thing (we know it's in international waters, they don't have the coastline to hide it from their own people), destroy key facilities where records are kept, and finally assault and penetrate the defences of the island the Madmartigan is harbouring at.
The missions are speculative, but we would have a first world carrier with 120 years of fuel, that the builder's can't admit exists.

Like I get the prestige of it all boss, but what are we going to do with a carrier? Hell, how are we going to pay all these personnel on dictator money? How are we going to keep the thing safe without a carrier group?

What are going to say when a 1st world nation starts asking questions? They're going to know we didn't just commission the thing.

>are you a bad enough dude to fly a motorized kite with bazookas strapped to the wing struts to blow up enemy armor?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Carpenter_(lieutenant_colonel)

It gives us flexibility. We don't have to rely on foreign airfields, we don't have to lay out so much on security to stop coked-out soldiers damaging our aircraft. We can up sticks and pull the whole operation from one theatre to another faster. The money saved in logistics ought to pay for at least a small crew, though we're not doing true blue water naval aviation for a while. The carrier group problem is a real one, but we will have to trade on mobility over force.

Well now you need STOBAR/CATOBAR planes which means buying a new airforce, plus a carrier group to protect your new multimillion inversion from missiles/sub attacks might as well sell the carrier and buy a fleet of tankers/buddy refueling pods for your planes

>"Crop dust" a "field"
>Deliver "emergency food supplies" to "refugee camps"
>Pull a surprise raid on an enemy airbase, destroy vital intelligence they have on you. Optional goals include grounding planes, stealing experimental weaponry, bullying air traffic control
>Surgical strikes in cities

I need you and your men to bomb the ever loving fuck out of these coordinates. You will be paid fairly.

>Well now you need STOBAR/CATOBAR planes which means buying a new airforce
Our need to operate from shitty improvised airfields made us switch to VTOL about ten years back.
>Carrier group
We'll be operating with assistance of client governments. We can leave escort duties to them.
It's like you don't want to be the glorious fighter aces of a free floating military republic!

Aren't Carrier based aircraft some of the most common?
I mean Canada flies the CF-18, and we don't even own a damn carrier.

Also a little suspension of disbelief is required to even consider a mercenary airforce as viable. Its not much more to allow for a stolen carrier.

Never even heard of this. Is it any good?

>VTOL
Then you don't even need a carrier, just some old container ship

Not all F-18 have the little hook at the end to be used in carriers or the folding wings, Canadians ones have them tho, but yeah if you already have the fighters might as well use them in your new fancy carrier

A part of me thinks this concept would work a lot better in a space related setting. Your group gets most of it's jobs by either being escorts for cargo fairing vessels or by denying them entry into specific sectors as part of a blockade.

Throw in the occasional deniable ops missions where you break out the black paint and pretend to be a craft from an enemy nation and do a few bombing runs to kick start a conflict here and there for war profitteering or just swoop in when two other mercenary groups have exhausted themselves, chase away the survivors/winners and loot the corpses essentially.

>Its not much more to allow for a stolen carrier.

I dunno about that, mate. A few planes and their pilots are one thing--you just need a runway, fuel, and a maintenance crew for that. But a carrier of any significant size is an entirely different logistical beast. It'll need everything that goes into the planes themselves, plus be crewed by literally thousands of people, and will need fuel in and of itself (since a nuclear-powered one would stretch it even further). For me, that's not a small leap.

It's no Porco Rosso but it's alright.

You'll also need security, people to secure sources of supply for food/parts/fuel/weapons/ammo/electricity/airfield repairs, people to pay your people and others for all the stuff you're buying to keep the place running, and probably more stuff I can't think of or am overlooking. Unless you're trying to say you're just gonna run it out of a civil airport and risk being impounded for merc activities because you're easily traced there.

t. Air Force

Get a Hind, hire a personal ground crew, find other mercs to door gun. You'll find plenty of work in Africa.

youtube.com/watch?v=0bC0zPngc4c

>not just getting a timeshare at the local mercenary airport

Pretty extravagant setup, senpai

>not wanting to be your own independent proprietor

This is why you'll only ever fly small time support missions. Enjoy the left behind pizza boxes in your hangars.

>loosing all your sweet warbucks to endless upkeep

It's like yachts dude, know the guy who owns one but don't ever be the guy who owns one

The yacht would be more like the Aircraft Carrier above, because you have all that + ship keeping.

>Then you don't even need a carrier, just some old container ship
Where's your fucking PRIDE, man?!

>I thought Aggressor squadrons already often flew surplus Soviet/Russian planes, and used Soviet/Russian tactics.

Certainly they can, but for the majority of people in the military have doctrine jammed into their skull and it's difficult to turn it off.

It's why, for example, US Army Special Forces allows men from all Military Occupational Specialties/Career Management Fields to attend Special Forces Assessment and Selection even though generally the SF mission is an infantry mission (they're also the only CMF other than Infantry that is authorized to be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge). Because the small team mission of Special Forces (10-13 man Operational Detachment Alpha conducting a variety of missions in friendly and enemy territory) is enhanced by a variety of backgrounds and experiences. And generally (there are always exceptions) infantry enlisted and officers have a narrow band of experiences and are very unlikely to stray far from conventional Army doctrine.

Here's two tables from an Army study of SFAS and SFQC (Special Forces Qualification Course) classes from 89 to 91. In the first table to you can see that overall there's about a 60/40 split of combat arms (not just infantry, but also armor, artillery, cavalry scout) to non combat arms (intel, finance, admin, supply, S6/commo, engineer, maintenance etc.) of those who attend selection.

The second table illustrates the initial assignments for each MOS. 18B is the Weapons Sergeant MOS and is generally the most relevant to infantry experience.

The final table shows successful SFQC completion rates for combat arms and non combat arms. They are generally the same. Because it's in the best interests of USASOCOM to pull from a variety of backgrounds even though their mission is generally an infantry mission.

youtube.com/watch?v=_dV2Gtqo0UU
I'm plying you don't want to invade some 3rd world hell hole using stealthy cargo ships

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Thanks!
Will be really useful in the campaign

>> Don't mind me, seeing if greentext will work while as a spoiler

>> Don't mind me, seeing if greentext will work while as a spoiler

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Not really related, but reminds me of a fun fact - during a very brief war between India and Portugal over Goa, Portugal managed to smuggle in a pair of artillery units disguised as soccer players to main a few anti-aircraft guns. And due to some countries in the intervening airspace not wanting Portugal carrying weapons, a plane that was meant to carry grenades ended up carrying a bunch of sausages and a few female paratroopers.

The local military has suddenly been cut off from jet-grade fuel through sanctions and the local separatist militia realized it was a good time to attack govt. fuel convoys. Now that the regime has temporarily lost its asymmetrical advantage, they need your friendly neighborhood PMC to run CAS missions while the govt. unfucks things.

Unfortunately, the separatists have a good chunk of portable anti-air, so a strike on their weapons caches would help alleviate the situation. Help cover the friendlies so the scouts can locate enemy positions and possible cache locations!

And keep your ears up. Rumor is the separatists have amassed enough wealth to hire PMCs for themselves, and we all know a certain rival company is itching to dig their teeth in...