The Gun Counter

The U.S. Air Force has decided to indefinitely postpone the retirement of the legendary A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack plane.

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F-35 Thunderjug deployment postponed indefinitely due to being a total POS in 5, 4, 3...

I was the head intel geek for an A-10 squadron, back in the days of DS1, and I learned a few simple things.
The Air Farce will ditch the A-10s when every swingin' Richard who ever called for air support is mouldering in the grave. Until then, they may bitch about the parts inventory, or the maintenance hassles, or the cost of tea in China, but the guys on the ground ain't givin' it up!

Aesop wrote:

The U.S. Air Force, after being beaten into submissive paste by Congress, has decided to indefinitely postpone the retirement of the legendary A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack plane.

Fixed it for them

Well, good. I always liked the Warthog, and rolled in the shadow of its wing several times.

So like last time the Air Force wanted to retire it, did the Army and Marine Corps say "we'll take'em?"

SA

scipioafricanus wrote:So like last time the Air Force wanted to retire it, did the Army and Marine Corps say "we'll take'em?"

SA

Oh, yeah. The Air Force doesn't want the Army having any winged aircraft that are armed. We've got a few fixed wing that are unarmed, but the AF is very defensive about the subject. It pisses them off that the Army had more aircraft than they do (if you count rotor-wing aircraft).

It's still a 20-ton jet doing a 7-ton plane's job.

Heavily armored and capable of flying low and slow, the A-10 was built to make devastating low-level attacks against Soviet armored columns with missiles, bombs, and its GAU-8/A Avenger 30-millimeter gun.

Partially correct.

The only part that's armored is the damn titanium bathtub, whose sole utility is helping the pilot live long enough to eject, and causing electromagnetic interference problems since there's only one hole in it through which to run all the wires into the cockpit that carry the signals to the avionics that keep the Hawg relevant, since things like "blue-on-blue" tend to be even more frowned upon today than in the 1970s.


A bird strike on the "heavily armored" A-10.

It was intended to take out tanks with bombs and missiles in a threat environment primarily made up of AAA that would seem positively Stone Age today. As for the GAU-8, it was barely capable of damaging T-62s when it came out. Thanks to the PACS upgrade in the 1990s, you're more likely to score a damaging hit on one, but relatively few countries use the T-62 anymore.

Frankly, the GAU-8 is garbage. It's not enough gun to do what it's supposed to do anymore, i.e. take out armored vehicles, and it's too much gun for everything else. You don't need 30mm to shred light vehicles and people, but it does do a nice job rattling the jet apart.

The Air Force contends that the A-10 can no longer survive on the modern battlefield against modern air defenses.

Yeah, with a few widely-publicized exceptions, Desert Storm proved the notion of A-10s taking hits and limping back home was a non-starter. The Strela-10 saw to that. Without SEAD, the A-10 is in serious trouble.

Critics of the retirement plan charge that the fast, unarmored F-35 isn't a real replacement for the A-10, and the limitations of the F-35's gun—which is less powerful than the GAU-8/A and carries a meager 220 rounds—make it less useful in close air support situations. The F-35 will also only be able to carry 1,000 pound GPS-guided bombs and 500 pound laser-guided bombs.

That's what SDBs are for. Additionally, the A-10 can't really carry that much either. If you want it to use smart weapons, you lose a weapon station to a TGP. If you want it to stand a snowball's chance in hell in a radar threat environment, you lose another one to an ECM pod. You lose another one for every external fuel tank you want to mount on it. You can't mount Mavericks -its actual primary anti-tank weapon- near the landing gear pods or you'll melt the exposed tires on launch. And if you're launching the jets out of somewhere up high like Bagram, they don't have the thrust to get off the ground with very much at all.

While the F-35's stealth and electronic warfare capabilities may help it survive on the battlefield longer, the A-10's ability to bring a truckload of air-to-ground weapons to the fight against ISIS is more useful.

See above.

You wanna proper replacement for the A-10? Build some Skyraiders.

Didn't they stop production of new planes back in the 80's?

Malthorn wrote:Didn't they stop production of new planes back in the 80's?

Of A-10s? Yeah, the last one rolled out in '84.

Jericho941 wrote:You wanna proper replacement for the A-10? Build some Skyraiders.

From your lips to God's ears.