A-10: Like a zombie, back from the dead!!!

[Aesop]

http://imgur.com/a/SD8Ew Consider that with a gun, this means pointing your plane straight at the ground at around 4,000 feet or less.

Um, no. And even for you, that's a bit bridge-dwellerish.

Oh, this should be good.

First of all, there's no way to point a gun "crooked at the ground", so every gun used in ground attack is pointed "straight a the ground".

Even for you, that's absurdly obtuse. If you can't tell from context that I'm talking about an excessively steep dive angle, then you have no business complaining about the reading comprehension of the average public high schooler.

I could tell; I was just giving you the benefit of the doubt in not suggesting something so asinine, nor absolutely contrary to all design and doctrine going into the use of the A-10. I've only watched a hundred or so peacetime passes marking targets for them*, and I can't seem to recall them pulling up to 4000' only to kick it over and dive near-vertically onto a target. But hey, maybe USAF strike pilots have gotten stupider in the last twenty or thirty years; I dunno. By most accounts and common sense, the higher they pop up, the longer the other side has to get a lock on them, and the farther away they can be seen. I think it's a geometry and physics thing, but I could be wrong there.

Strafing has been rather well-understood as such since about 1915, so this isn't exactly news.
And the stated range for the GAU-8 is 8,000 (horizontal) ft., so even allowing for slant range, that's a distance to target of around a country mile or more.

Ducky! But we're not talking about horizontal range. We're talking about the range at which the GAU-8 can be used to attack the top armor of a tank, penetrate it, and do so enough times to disable it. Which brings me to the next bit.

Stand on the second floor of a building, and look down on a tank or other armored vehicle. Note for reference that that's the "top", of which we're speaking here. The entire upper side of the vehicle, from bow to stern. Not just the top of the turret. You get this concept, right??

Popping up from cover or low altitude until just before that run complicates things for return fire somewhat, or as in GW I, the standard low-threat environment had them flying above 10K', and leisurely strafing targets of opportunity from well above the danger from AAA, because the range of the gun increases with altitude.

Yeah, about that. The GAU-8 will penetrate 38mm of armor from a thousand meters, or 3,280 feet. The roof of a T-62's turret is 40mm thick. If you try it from 10,000 feet up, you're not going to accomplish a damn thing. You're also going to miss a lot more, since under ideal conditions, with the PACS upgrade, 80% of your shots are going to go into roughly tank-sized target at... 4,000 feet.

I'll be sure and look up the pilots I spoke with extensively from GW I in 1991 who expressly stated the opposite, and tell them they were lying about how they did it.
And cleverly, the GAU-8 isn't shooting one bullet at the turret. It's shooting 65 rounds a second. So yeah, that wicked thick turret armor ( ) might have saved the tank crew...if it weren't for the other 64 bullets flying in right behind the first one. And then the other 65 in the other half of the 2-second burst. Which, lo and behold, provides for 10 2-second bursts before the drum is empty for a 1350-rd drum. Almost like someone at Fairchild Aviation planned this stuff out or something.
We won't even go into what the 30mm slugs do to the far less thick armor over the engine deck, the engine inside it, the driver's compartment, or all that neat shit hanging on the outside of the turret like targeting devices and optics. Note again this is all called the "top" of the tank(s) in question, none of which requires a vertical dive and 8G pull-out to target.
BTW, talk to PawPaw or any other tanker: the total number of penetrations necessary to disable a tank is generally accepted to be "one"; all that meat inside (not to mention the HE) responds poorly to DU or anything else pinging around inside the crew compartment until it runs out of energy.

These were not numbers I pulled out of my ass. Attacking the roof of a tank with the gun requires a steep dive angle at low altitude, which dramatically decreases the amount of time you can spend with the reticle on the target, which decreases the number of bullets you can shoot at it, which decreases the number of bullets you can actually put in it.

It makes a lot more sense to try and disable the tank's engine by attacking it from behind at a shallower dive angle.

See above. 130 rds x 0.80 P/h = 104 hits on the target in 2 seconds. During which time span the A-10 is covering +/- 500 yards in closing range.
Nothing too dramatic about shooting at something for 2 seconds and pulling off; that's how they train to do it. Just not by flying down out of the sun from 4000'. Are you sure you got that right? Srsly?
What possesses you to think that the turret is the only target?
Silly old me was referring to hitting the entire friggin' tank. We're not talking head shots; mobility kills count too, y'now?

So let's not be playing Silly Buggers about the concept of ground attack with guns, shall we?

Hey, you started it.

No, you seem to have confused "top of the turret" with "top of the tank". And then went full retard. I have no idea why.

Maybe this will help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lD5QqsVofg
Call me crazy, but those A-10s seem to be getting hits from about 500' AGL or less. Not doing Stuka dives from 4000' up.
Maybe you can explain why they don't fly those runs the way you think they must?
Was the Air Force confused that day, or...?

The simply fact is that the Hog can strafe 10 targets in 10 passes, with a pK of >80%, which is as many kills as the F-35 Thunderjug can achieve fully armed and loaded out assuming it gets 100% kills (which will never happen). And at which point it's about as stealthy as a steel barn.

And before they load up the other 11 hardpoints on the A-10 with anything at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FopyRHHlt3M

If stealth is a concern for the F-35, the A-10 can strafe 0 out of 0 targets in 0 passes, because it's either safely tucked away far from the AO or it's a burning crater.

Or [C], it's flying in at treetop level +50' exactly as designed, rather than trying to sneak in at Mach 1+ from 20,000'.

I'm also curious as to where you're getting these ridiculous numbers. Look up the Small Diameter Bomb and things like BRU racks. Foxtrot Alpha is not a valid source. A "fully armed and loaded out" F-35 will carry more than 10 individual weapons.

Only if we count the pilot's M9 as an individual weapon.
My sources are any number of open sources.
As for a fully armed and loaded out F-35, I don't think anyone's seen one in the wild yet, because they aren't sure it can get off the ground and hit anything, let alone survive long enough not to get shot to pieces on the way. It's got two weapons bays (which can carry one ground attack weapon@, and one AA missile@, total), 4 external heavy hard points, and two light ones. And almost enough ammo (182 or 220 rounds) for the 25mm to maybe make one pass, with less power on target and less range than the 30mm on the Hog.
That's 5-7 air-to-mud weapons, max, leaving it 3 targets short of an A-10 with just the gun, as if one would be launched that empty.
The A-10 was designed to take on 30,000 Soviet tanks; the F-35 was designed to bamboozle 535 congressmen and senators, and look sexy to an Air Force management that hates CAS with a visceral hatred since about 1947, if not 1917.
So far, both excel at those respective missions.

When they come up with something that'll do the job better, they should by all means adopt it.

We already have something that'll do the job better. It's called the F-15E. Unless you're talking about low-intensity conflict fixed-wing CAS, in which case everything we've got is a bit much, but at least we get more utility out of everything that's not a Hawg.

When they come up with something that'll do the job better, they should by all means adopt it.
But it ain't the F-35, and Congress knows it, which is why they've shoved a crowbar up USAF command's ass to pull their heads out, and halt shelving a more capable plane in favor of a ruptured turkey.

This is a populist move, nothing more. A-10 fanboys are the bronies of the aviation world.

And the hatred for the A-10 and the entire CAS mission is why they should take the Air Force away from the Air Force, and give it back to the Army, who might do something useful with it.

In an environment where you need F-15Es, by all means send them.
And then there are the conflicts and potential conflicts in any of the other 150 nations.

You can tell because they don't plan on paying for it.

Right.
And the F-35 is now down to how many planes, at what cost@...?
We could cancel that, and buy another Air Force, and a substantial chunk of Navy and Marine Corps.

Or just keep doing it the other way around, for a plane that was obsolete 10 years before it flew, and can't do anything it was supposedly designed for at even a mediocre level of performance.

This is simply warfare being too important to leave to generals. Or at least the ones in blue suits.



*(And another several hundred for Navy and Marine pilots doing the same thing, and wonder of wonders, they all do it just about the same:
come in below line-of-sight, pop up to maybe 500-1000' AGL max - usually no more than necessary - roll partially or fully inverted at the top of that arc, spot the target through the top of the canopy, roll upright, and lay into it with guns/missiles/bombs, then pull of in a different direction. Watching a two- or four ship flight work a target from all cardinal directions in succession is a thing of absolute beauty, provided you're not the "X".)

[Denis]

OK, Aesop and Jericho941.

We all get the point that you disagree with one another on maters of tankbusting tactics and technology. If you wish to continue your discussion, please do so like adults: lay off the acrimony, and tone down the hyperbole.

[Netpackrat]

What we really need to do is recruit an A-10 pilot to the forum, to finally settle this. Either that, or survivors of A-10 attacks on tanks. Might be a lot easier to find the former, though....

[Jericho941]

I could tell; I was just giving you the benefit of the doubt in not suggesting something so asinine, nor absolutely contrary to all design and doctrine going into the use of the A-10. I've only watched a hundred or so peacetime passes marking targets for them*, and I can't seem to recall them pulling up to 4000' only to kick it over and dive near-vertically onto a target. But hey, maybe USAF strike pilots have gotten stupider in the last twenty or thirty years; I dunno. By most accounts and common sense, the higher they pop up, the longer the other side has to get a lock on them, and the farther away they can be seen. I think it's a geometry and physics thing, but I could be wrong there.

I wasn't suggesting they actually do this, but by all means, that strawman had it coming.

Stand on the second floor of a building, and look down on a tank or other armored vehicle. Note for reference that that's the "top", of which we're speaking here. The entire upper side of the vehicle, from bow to stern. Not just the top of the turret. You get this concept, right??

K, so, you start firing before you can penetrate all the top armor you're facing. Fair enough. If we're still talking about "looking down from a building over it" angle though to get all that soft real estate in the picture, though, we're still talking about a ridiculous angle.

Yeah, about that. The GAU-8 will penetrate 38mm of armor from a thousand meters, or 3,280 feet. The roof of a T-62's turret is 40mm thick. If you try it from 10,000 feet up, you're not going to accomplish a damn thing. You're also going to miss a lot more, since under ideal conditions, with the PACS upgrade, 80% of your shots are going to go into roughly tank-sized target at... 4,000 feet.

I'll be sure and look up the pilots I spoke with extensively from GW I in 1991 who expressly stated the opposite, and tell them they were lying about how they did it.

I don't suppose they were kind enough to tell you want vehicles they were engaging and at what slant range now, were they?

And cleverly, the GAU-8 isn't shooting one bullet at the turret. It's shooting 65 rounds a second. So yeah, that wicked thick turret armor ( ) might have saved the tank crew...if it weren't for the other 64 bullets flying in right behind the first one. And then the other 65 in the other half of the 2-second burst. Which, lo and behold, provides for 10 2-second bursts before the drum is empty for a 1350-rd drum. Almost like someone at Fairchild Aviation planned this stuff out or something.

Except the GAU-8 is not a laser. Those 130 bullets are going to be dispersed over the rest of the tank and the landscape it's sitting on. Putting two 30mm in the same hole is winning the Powerball, even with PACS.

We won't even go into what the 30mm slugs do to the far less thick armor over the engine deck, the engine inside it, the driver's compartment, or all that neat shit hanging on the outside of the turret like targeting devices and optics. Note again this is all called the "top" of the tank(s) in question, none of which requires a vertical dive and 8G pull-out to target.

"It makes a lot more sense to try and disable the tank's engine by attacking it from behind at a shallower dive angle."

Would it help if I added "You know, like they actually do?" Because I really think that you're going out of your way to take anything left unsaid as a blank space on a Mad Lib.

BTW, talk to PawPaw or any other tanker: the total number of penetrations necessary to disable a tank is generally accepted to be "one"; all that meat inside (not to mention the HE) responds poorly to DU or anything else pinging around inside the crew compartment until it runs out of energy.

There's what a 30mm might do, and there's what a 250-pound bomb will do.

Or [C], it's flying in at treetop level +50' exactly as designed, rather than trying to sneak in at Mach 1+ from 20,000'.

If you can get away with terrain masking, there's no call for stealth because you're fighting someone who hasn't got anything so advanced as a MiG-23.

As for a fully armed and loaded out F-35, I don't think anyone's seen one in the wild yet, because they aren't sure it can get off the ground and hit anything, let alone survive long enough not to get shot to pieces on the way. It's got two weapons bays (which can carry one ground attack weapon@, and one AA missile@, total), 4 external heavy hard points, and two light ones. And almost enough ammo (182 or 220 rounds) for the 25mm to maybe make one pass, with less power on target and less range than the 30mm on the Hog.
That's 5-7 air-to-mud weapons, max, leaving it 3 targets short of an A-10 with just the gun, as if one would be launched that empty.

The number of weapons stations is not identical to the possible number of weapons carried on said stations. Depending on how you want to configure the F-35, you could have it carrying at least 16 air-to-ground weapons and a pair of AIM-120s without even touching the internal bay.

And the hatred for the A-10 and the entire CAS mission is why they should take the Air Force away from the Air Force, and give it back to the Army, who might do something useful with it.

Y'know, everyone takes Air Force hatred for CAS as a truism but nobody's ever able to actually cite anything to prove it. Like carrots improving night vision, it's nonsense, and we can probably blame the Brits (and their Hurricane pilots) for it, as "the assignment of fighter units to the fighter-bomber role struck a heavy blow to the self-esteem of those pilots first assigned to such duties."

Right.
And the F-35 is now down to how many planes, at what cost@...?
We could cancel that, and buy another Air Force, and a substantial chunk of Navy and Marine Corps.

Except Congress is not going to. They're going to keep decreasing the Air Force's budget and expanding its mission, just like they've done constantly for the last 25 years, and insist all the same toys stick around for sentimental reasons while simultaneously forcing the JSF along because accountability falls nowhere near them. Just like they're going to keep passing a budget in excess of the debt ceiling and then act surprised when the ceiling needs to be raised.

I do wonder where the next "cost saving measure" will hit. Maybe they'll finally throw out the pension system and tie up everyone's retirement with the stock market, or that Tricare and the VA are too cushy to keep around.

What we really need to do is recruit an A-10 pilot to the forum, to finally settle this. Either that, or survivors of A-10 attacks on tanks. Might be a lot easier to find the former, though....

You're gonna want one that's probably been retired for awhile, ie Desert Storm/very early OIF experience. I've debriefed plenty of A-10 pilots, but the topics were entirely "how many rounds expended in how many trigger pulls, how many aerial refuelings, duration of flight, what's broken," and they were never up against anything more heavily armored than a jeep. The laser Maverick used on it was probably a waste, but the effects were entertaining.

[HTRN]

I'm surprised there isn't a drone or UAV to take over for CAS work.

A bunch of the ucavs have the ability to carry and launch the hell fire and/or the sdb.

[g-man]

The number of weapons stations is not identical to the possible number of weapons carried on said stations. Depending on how you want to configure the F-35, you could have it carrying at least 16 air-to-ground weapons and a pair of AIM-120s without even touching the internal bay.

Except at that point you throw anything resembling stealth out the window, and you might as well be flying the Hog, or the aforementioned real bomb-truck, the 15E.

The real issue for guys on the ground is that we still need something to strafe enemy formations, such as a Taliban group along a woodline, ridge, roadside, etc, etc. And yes, a Skyraider or similar aircraft would likely get the job done. But given the option between a slower flying A-10 that can make 10ish passes and a F-35 that can manage maybe two... I'll take the Hog, thankyouverymuch. If we're dicing it up with an enemy with actual tanks, we're in an entirely different kind of fight, at which point I'll take whatever fast mover carrying however much 'splodey stuff it can manage, as soon as possible (or some friends with tanks).

Something like the F-35 is needed long term. But the Army did away with a bunch of big programs (Crusader, etc) and used that money on iterative improvement of things that already work. The Air Force mortgaged the entire service to include manning in order to gamble that this thing might work. And while it's pretty good, it's still not nearly as effective as advertised, and is WAY behind schedule and over budget. Design specs should not include things which as of when they're written, require magic.

[Aesop]

I wasn't suggesting they actually do this, but by all means, that strawman had it coming.

I see; you meant it until you got called on meaning it, so now it's a strawman. Well-played, sir.

K, so, you start firing before you can penetrate all the top armor you're facing. Fair enough. If we're still talking about "looking down from a building over it" angle though to get all that soft real estate in the picture, though, we're still talking about a ridiculous angle.

We're talking about hitting it anywhere on the topside, which is a ridiculously shallow angle. Good Christ, man, you could see A-10s peeling up from down low in the video I linked, not peeling off from Stuka dive-bomb attacks. And wait, that was supposed to be a strawman argument, and yet here you are making the same assertion AGAIN.
You keep using strawman. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I don't suppose they were kind enough to tell you want vehicles they were engaging and at what slant range now, were they?

They were pretty clear that coming in from high and staying above 5000' was their standard tactic for all vehicles, regardless, starting on about Day Two, because AAA was their only concern at that point. They seem to have scored some number of hits in that conflict, when last I looked.

Except the GAU-8 is not a laser. Those 130 bullets are going to be dispersed over the rest of the tank and the landscape it's sitting on. Putting two 30mm in the same hole is winning the Powerball, even with PACS.

So your newest argument is that therefore the GAU-8 was virtually incapable of doing any significant damage to the pride of 1962 Soviet tank production, and everything since, despite its adoption way back in the 1970s, and 30+ year (now indefinite) service life? Geez, I get it; thank God you've tipped the USAF off about its shortcomings, and it's a real shame we all foolishly thought it worked until now. Thanks for informing this debate, and I'll adjust my arguments accordingly.
And hey, isn't it great they put a smaller 25mm gun firing a weaker round in the F-35?!?
And carry only 20% as much ammo?!?
GENIUS!
At this rate, the next USAF CAS brainstorm will be a Sten with a 32rd stick mag, which is then thrown out the window when empty. Like Frank Sinatra did from a Piper Cub in Cast A Giant Shadow.

"It makes a lot more sense to try and disable the tank's engine by attacking it from behind at a shallower dive angle."

Would it help if I added "You know, like they actually do?" Because I really think that you're going out of your way to take anything left unsaid as a blank space on a Mad Lib.

You were so busy making this about 90-degree dives to shoot up the "impossible-to-penetrate" turret top armor. But pat yourself on the back for saying that after deciding nobody else was.
Hey, good thing USArEur never found out the A-10 was an ineffective POS, huh?

There's what a 30mm might do, and there's what a 250-pound bomb will do.

Unless it's laser guided ordnance, that 250# bomb will throw up a lot of dust. The odds of one hitting a tank are worse than powerball odds. Unlike, say, aiming a nice BRRRT-worth of DU slugs right at the tank.
Which, yet again, is why they put the gun in the air in the first place. Too bad, according to you, that it will never work, right?

If you can get away with terrain masking, there's no call for stealth because you're fighting someone who hasn't got anything so advanced as a MiG-23.

Evidently no one thought of Mig-23s in the 1970-1990 era in Central Europe, as that was the exact time and place the A-10 was conceived, deployed, and operated. Once again, thanks for straightening out the entire USAF doctrine on A-10 CAS for the most relevant years of its service deployment, at the time when our military was huge and world-beating. Literally.

The number of weapons stations is not identical to the possible number of weapons carried on said stations. Depending on how you want to configure the F-35, you could have it carrying at least 16 air-to-ground weapons and a pair of AIM-120s without even touching the internal bay.

Thanks for clearing that up. This is clearly why the A-10, with 11 external hardpoints, makes so much less sense to deploy than the F-35, with only 6.
Wait, what?

Y'know, everyone takes Air Force hatred for CAS as a truism but nobody's ever able to actually cite anything to prove it. Like carrots improving night vision, it's nonsense, and we can probably blame the Brits (and their Hurricane pilots) for it, as "the assignment of fighter units to the fighter-bomber role struck a heavy blow to the self-esteem of those pilots first assigned to such duties."

It might be the practice of assigning the less-capable pilots to fly the mud-pounders since the founding of the USAF Academy, at least.
It might be the institutional second-class status accorded to CAS missions, and the pilots who flew them, since 1947.
It might have been the decision in the run up to GW I to leave all the A-10s behind in Europe and the States when facing one of the largest tank armies in the world, until Army Gen. Schwarzkopf politely suggested to the blue suiter running air ops ever so sweetly that he pull his noggin out of his ass and bring the A-10s along.
It might have been the decision, five minutes after GW I was over, where including the A-10s proved to have been a boon (despite, apparently, being unable to reliably kill a single 1960s era Soviet tank according to you, right?) to immediately reduce their numbers, and designate them as FAC aircraft, armed henceforth with nothing but WP marking rockets.
It might have been the decision recently to mothball the entire inventory of A-10s, despite no replacement for it being yet in full service, nor ever likely to be.
Mind you, I'm just spit-balling here, since "no one's ever been able to prove it".
But IMHO, 68 years of institutional history, the entire time the USAF has existed as a separate service, would seem to indicate a trend, despite any superhuman efforts at gainsaying the proposition.
Maybe you require someone to wear a wire to AF strategy meetings and get an indictment in federal court before you'll acknowledge what the rest of the civilized world knows: the Air Force hates CAS, and always has. After 20,000 incidents, it's not profiling anymore. It's a predictive indicator.

Except Congress is not going to. They're going to keep decreasing the Air Force's budget and expanding its mission, just like they've done constantly for the last 25 years, and insist all the same toys stick around for sentimental reasons while simultaneously forcing the JSF along because accountability falls nowhere near them. Just like they're going to keep passing a budget in excess of the debt ceiling and then act surprised when the ceiling needs to be raised.

I do wonder where the next "cost saving measure" will hit. Maybe they'll finally throw out the pension system and tie up everyone's retirement with the stock market, or that Tricare and the VA are too cushy to keep around.

Welcome to the Department of Defense.
Things are tough all over. Ask the Navy, Army, and Marines about doing more with less.
(And this is all new: because I wasn't issued a flak vest in the 1980s with Vietnam graffiti on it, or given a WWII-era steel pot, nor ate C-rats, nor qualled with a .45 pistol so old it rattled, nor serviced a howitzer rebarrelled three times going back to Guadalcanal, and deploying on CH-46s that flew into DaNang, or living in temporary barracks built in 1942. And the same was never true of all the services before either, from Valley Forge to yesterday, inclusive. There is a solution though.)

And yet, we're still buying the Thunderjug.
So, who has naked pictures of the service secretaries and ranking members of defense appropriations with midgets and farm animals?
The "sentimental reasons" include the proven track record of weapons systems in combat.
When you start stacking them up like Brewster Buffaloes against Zeroes, we can talk.
Maybe you noticed that the F-22 buy didn't come anywhere close to putting F-15s out of business, any more than B-2s or F-117s got rid of the Bone or the B-52? Do you really fancy that's sheer sentiment?

What we really need to do is recruit an A-10 pilot to the forum, to finally settle this. Either that, or survivors of A-10 attacks on tanks. Might be a lot easier to find the former, though....

You're gonna want one that's probably been retired for awhile, ie Desert Storm/very early OIF experience. I've debriefed plenty of A-10 pilots, but the topics were entirely "how many rounds expended in how many trigger pulls, how many aerial refuelings, duration of flight, what's broken," and they were never up against anything more heavily armored than a jeep. The laser Maverick used on it was probably a waste, but the effects were entertaining.

So...wait...this all comes down to "it can't be true because I've never heard it first-hand, because it happened while I was in middle school, or diapers, or before I was born?"
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

How stupid of me: I forget the rules of Millenials.
Forget I ever mentioned this topic.
The A-10 is a piece of shit, the gun is totally worthless hype, the missiles were a waste, the tactics either imaginary or suicidal, because none of this ever happened after 2000 or so. QED
How foolish and short-sighted of the Air Force to cave to pressure to use a plane from the 1970s that carries a bigger gun, more rounds, and more air-to-ground weapons, with an actual track record, rather than depending on the unproven, budget-busting, obsolete, inferior, but brand-new-to-right-this-minute-guys F-35.
This is why the replacement for the HMMWV should be a Prius, right?

Oh, and somebody tell those stupid bastards at AFHQ that the B-52 is 60+ years old, and the C-130 only slightly younger.

Be sure and drop in when we talk about the Apollo moon missions; the insights from post-history will be priceless.

And hey, you kids get off my lawn.

[First Shirt]

Air Force "Top Gun" competition, 1990 (despite the name, it was a strictly air-to-ground exercise). A reserve A-10 squadron swept every single phase of the competition, bombs, guns, and ground crew comps. Somewhere around here I think I still have my copy of the videotape.

After every A-10 bomb run, the ground crews had to go out and weld the aiming point back on the turret. (It was a white-painted piece of 6-inch pipe, three feet long). Granted, it was a stationary target, and they were only using 75 lb. practice bombs, but half the F-16s didn't hit the tank, and the A-7s looked like Jerry's Kids. The worst performing A-10 outdid the BEST performing F-16.

It may be the biggest POS since the Buffalo, but I'd be okay letting them do CAS for me.

YMMV, JMHO, IRDDU, other caveats as needed.

[BDK]

Staying out of this, other than I went to HS with the son of an A-10 pilot in GW I - he liked his A-10 quite a bit.

[Jericho941]

I wasn't suggesting they actually do this, but by all means, that strawman had it coming.

I see; you meant it until you got called on meaning it, so now it's a strawman. Well-played, sir.

It's really not hard to understand. At no point did I assert that A-10 pilots actually attack ground targets from such a steep angle. I was saying that, in order to effectively attack just the top armor, they would have to. Which they don't. Otherwise they would have zero reason to care about things like side armor and road wheels.

We're talking about hitting it anywhere on the topside, which is a ridiculously shallow angle. Good Christ, man, you could see A-10s peeling up from down low in the video I linked, not peeling off from Stuka dive-bomb attacks. And wait, that was supposed to be a strawman argument, and yet here you are making the same assertion AGAIN.
You keep using strawman. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I keep using it only because you keep doing it. Again: At no point have I asserted they actually, in real life, that is, the non-theoretical world, attack Stuka-style.

They were pretty clear that coming in from high and staying above 5000' was their standard tactic for all vehicles, regardless, starting on about Day Two, because AAA was their only concern at that point. They seem to have scored some number of hits in that conflict, when last I looked.

Hokay, so, generic and utterly useless anecdote. Thanks.

So your newest argument is that therefore the GAU-8 was virtually incapable of doing any significant damage to the pride of 1962 Soviet tank production, and everything since, despite its adoption way back in the 1970s, and 30+ year (now indefinite) service life? Geez, I get it; thank God you've tipped the USAF off about its shortcomings, and it's a real shame we all foolishly thought it worked until now. Thanks for informing this debate, and I'll adjust my arguments accordingly.

The gun was never the A-10's primary anti-tank weapon.

There's what a 30mm might do, and there's what a 250-pound bomb will do.

Unless it's laser guided ordnance, that 250# bomb will throw up a lot of dust. The odds of one hitting a tank are worse than powerball odds. Unlike, say, aiming a nice BRRRT-worth of DU slugs right at the tank.

Which it is, in the case of the F-35, and won't be in the case of the A-10 without adding a TGP.

Evidently no one thought of Mig-23s in the 1970-1990 era in Central Europe, as that was the exact time and place the A-10 was conceived, deployed, and operated. Once again, thanks for straightening out the entire USAF doctrine on A-10 CAS for the most relevant years of its service deployment, at the time when our military was huge and world-beating. Literally.

Or maybe the A-10 was never meant to fly in airspace contested by anything more serious than AAA.

Thanks for clearing that up. This is clearly why the A-10, with 11 external hardpoints, makes so much less sense to deploy than the F-35, with only 6.
Wait, what?

Except in a permissive environment, it's 10. If you want smart weapons on the A-10, you lose a station to a TGP. For a less-than-permissive environment, it's 9 because you need an ECM pod. You don't need either of those with the F-35.

It's worth remembering here that the F-35 is a direct replacement for the F-16, which already does CAS more often than the A-10. Speed counts. The F-35 is not a direct replacement for the A-10, the idea is that we can afford to give up the A-10 since its mission is encompassed by a multirole platform.

Mind you, I'm just spit-balling here, since "no one's ever been able to prove it".

Well, as long as we're throwing anecdotes around, I could mention the pilots I've talked to talking about how flying fighters is a career-killer.

Welcome to the Department of Defense.
Things are tough all over. Ask the Navy, Army, and Marines about doing more with less.
(And this is all new: because I wasn't issued a flak vest in the 1980s with Vietnam graffiti on it, or given a WWII-era steel pot, nor ate C-rats, nor qualled with a .45 pistol so old it rattled, nor serviced a howitzer rebarrelled three times going back to Guadalcanal, and deploying on CH-46s that flew into DaNang, or living in temporary barracks built in 1942. And the same was never true of all the services before either, from Valley Forge to yesterday, inclusive. There is a solution though.)

If you want a WW2 attrition rate, by all means, "harden the fuck up" and pay for a military kitted out entirely with WW2 equipment and consisting of 2/3 conscripts. You will lose the next war in the manliest way possible.

Or we can knock it off with the appeals to emotion and look realistically at vehicles rather than "I like this, it has big gun, it best."

Equipment is equipment, and telling an A-10 to harden the fuck up will never get it to release its inner strength and survive a hit from a Strela-10. This isn't anime, or Herbie the Love Hawg.

Maybe you noticed that the F-22 buy didn't come anywhere close to putting F-15s out of business, any more than B-2s or F-117s got rid of the Bone or the B-52? Do you really fancy that's sheer sentiment?

The F-22 didn't put the F-15 out of business because our dumbass SECDEF actually ended production of the F-22 before we had enough of them to replace all the F-15Cs. We weren't supposed to have any in active service right now.

So...wait...this all comes down to "it can't be true because I've never heard it first-hand, because it happened while I was in middle school, or diapers, or before I was born?"
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

How stupid of me: I forget the rules of Millenials.

Hooooly fuck, dude, I'm literally saying "You want to talk to pilots who've had the opportunity to shoot at armored vehicles" here. I went out of my way here to indicate that my own particular experience here is useless. Chill.