Getting rid of the A-10?

[ink]

I think they are moving to "unmanned systems" now..

Heck, they have tank seeking projectiles fired from arty weapons..
Or, Anti tank guided cluster bombs.. Kills many tanks with one shot..

Energy weapons that will kill the crew inside without destroying the tank..
Boil their brains in their own Juices..

We just hear about 10% of what DARPA has already cooked up..
And the people runnin this stuff are completely UNSCRUPULOUS!

This world is headed to a very Dark place again..
Glad i won't be around much longer to see it..

GOTT MIT UNS!

have any kids?

[RngFndr]

have any kids?

Grandchildren.. One of them just started High School..

[ink]

Grandchildren.. One of them just started High School..

ya thats awesome but sux at the same time....they are the ones that have to deal with the world and what it's becoming.

same with my kids....I feel guilty I brought kids into this fed up world.

[jollyFE]

A-10s have helped me out before...would hate to see them go.

I sure got a warm fuzzy when we had A-10s as our RESCORT doing the Sandy thing.

[SIM]

After reading some of the posts in this thread.....I for one am going to buy stock in a factory that specializes in the production of conspiracy proof tin foil.  

[Maverick]

This is one of the reasons I think splitting the AF totally away from the Army in 47 was a BAD thing. They have forgotten that they are not the be all of the battlefield either in the strategic or tactical area. They are forgetting that one of their missions is to support ground ops while the dead heads in the pentagon all have visions of zoomie supersonic shiny planes buzzing around in their heads. Unless and until you control the ground you do not take real estate from the bad guys. Unfortunately their short sightedness is going to cost us lives. The navy in conjunction with the Marines understand that concept but the AF has no real clue about combined arms operations. It doesn't end at air superiority or even parity.

[DurrD]

The A-10 was and is projected to be kept out to the year 2030, but sequestration is threatening that plan.  Our Chief of Staff, Gen Welsh, recently stated the we may need to cut entire aircraft types due to the lack of funding.  The targets for such cuts would be any aircraft that only has one mission.  Sadly, the entire A-10 fleet is one of the possibilities.

This makes me sad personally, as I, in common with probably everybody in the military, have a great fondness for the sheer awesomeness that is the A-10.  It has a gun like none other that has ever flown.  

That said, I have been assigned at one of the largest combined arms exercises the military runs today (NTC at Fort Irwin) for about 20 training rotations now, and the A-10 is starting to reach the point of not being very survivable in any kind of contested environment.  Everybody talks about how tough it is, and that is true against many older threats.  It would likely shake off any MANPAD hits, and can survive up to 23mm cannon up to a point.  However, the threats it was designed against have been upgraded, and there are systems in the hands of many of our enemies that simply keep the A-10 out of the fight.  Last month we flew F-35s here for the first time, and while we did not test them against our replicated threat systems yet, we believe that they are going to be much more survivable against such threats as the SA-15 and the 2S6.

On the modern battlefield, anything not stealthy is going to die until we can achieve air superiority.  Now, once we do achieve air superiority (and not just against enemy aircraft, but against their IADS), the A-10 is once again the best CAS airplane ever made.

By the way, remotely piloted aircraft are ironically in a similar boat.  The ones we have now (primarily Predators and Reapers) are simply not survivable in a contested environment.  What we are finding is that when fighting an enemy that actually has air defense, they die almost immediately upon arrival to the battlefield.

[DurrD]

Somebody mentioned DARPA.  Those cats have been out here testing stuff several times in the last few years that I have been at the NTC, and no kidding they have some cool toys.

Like an engineer acquaintance that worked on the F-117 program told me once, "The F-117 (Stealth Fighter) was designed in the 1970's, was not publicly acknowledged until the late 1980's, and was obsolete in the 1990's.  You can imagine what we are working on now 40 years later".  Indeed, I constantly meet people that think the F-117 is cutting edge technology, that don't realize that it is obsolete and has been completely retired for years now.

[DurrD]

Regarding the wisdom of having the USAF as a separate service.  You do have a valid point that many in the USAF do not give CAS it's proper importance.  I am part of an AF TACP unit right now, and we are down and dirty with the Army troops, so trust me, we see the importance, as do many whole communities in the USAF (A-10s, AC-130's, even F-16s).  That said, the flip side of that coin is that many in the Army do not realize the importance of the strategic level air campaign, and they often do not realize the importance of absolute air dominance at times. 

The classic example was in North Africa in WW2.  The Army commanders wanted the air assigned at the lower echelons so that the ground forces could see that they had friendly air supporting them.  That ended up being a huge failure in actual practice though, as air power needs to be massed for best effects in a situation like that.  What many of the Battalion, Brigade, and even Division level leaders failed to realize, and certainly the grunt on the ground probably wasn't thinking about is that it is far more effective to kill a column of tank via interdiction miles behind the battle area, vs trying to distinguish friend from foe and pick them off once they are deployed in the front line area.  This is still true today.  Even with all our technology, fratricide is still a huge threat, so it is always better to interdict the enemy in an area where that is not a factor if possible.  If you have also taken out the bridges, rail lines, and natural choke-points such as mountain passes, tunnels, etc then even better.  We learned that lesson in Korea as well.  That does not remove the need for CAS to support your friendlies against the enemies that have already made it to the battle area.

As far as air superiority, if you don't have it, you will lose.  Period.  There are basically zero instances of a conventional battle being won by a force that did not have at least local air superiority.  Everybody sees air superiority and thinks "killing enemy airplanes", but that is only part of it.  We have that part licked, as even our F-15C's, which are the most dominant fighter plane in history, are still capable of seizing and holding not just air superiority, but air dominance if enemy planes are all we are talking about.  However, air superiority also includes enemy surface-to-air threats, and there are some truly scary ones out there now.  These systems are starting to be proliferated to all of our potential enemies, and will render any aircraft useless (or dead) that does not have stealth technology baked in, as well as state of the art electronic countermeasures.  Watching the exercises here at GREEN FLAG-West at the NTC, it has been a revelation to me how even a single SA-6 battery (not modern SAM technology by any means) can stiff-arm CAS out of the fight for hours on end before it is finally SEAD'd or DEAD'd.

[jimson]

I have a book somewhere about the A10 in the '91 Gulf war. It ended on a sad note as one of the pilots described flying them to Davis Monthan for storage and eventual disposal as of course the Air Force fighter mafia wanted rid of them.

Moving on, 22 years later, nearly a quarter of a century. The Air Force is still trying to get rid of them. But the old Hog refuses to die. It's still too useful.

They have stored some, but I still see them flying everyday.

[DurrD]

Oh, there are still plenty of them around for now (343 to be exact between active duty, ANG, and Reserve).  If sequestration doesn't throw a monkey wrench into the plan, they will be kept until 2030 at least.

[Rich46yo]

USAF really doesnt want to get down in the dirt. At least with inexpensive airplanes. Like any service they want the shiny new stuff and the big budgets, and for a long, long time the USAF was used to getting its own way. Now? With reduced budgets, the lack of a real legitimate conventional enemy, the common sense doctrine of fusion between the services, and inflation of high tech weapons systems, USAF wants out of ground pounding even more. I think it was Congress who saved the A10 time and time again no doubt egged on by the military leadership that actually has brains.

There is no "survivable" CAS airplane until air superiority is achieved. Not an F35 ; Not a A10. Anyone that would put a $100 m F35 into the kinda AA the A10s survived in in the Gulf would have to be nuts. And remember we had air superiority there. Besides the F35s will have a full plate already keeping down the advanced AA systems that all have a point defense capability and dont need to be wired into a network to be dangerous.

Even with air superiority/supremacy the manpads and gun tube AA we will likely encounter will still be lethal to fragile high tech air craft like the F35. We have forgotton how in the Gulf we had to keep out F16s so high and even change Tornado attack profiles due to the danger from 40 and 50 yo AA systems. Only the A10 could get down in the muck for CAS. Hell in Iraq-2 a bunch of Army Longbows got all shot up going against standard AA.

It would just be a tragedy to lose these things. The air frame itself is very well liked by the USAF troops who are assigned to them. The biggest danger for the A10s come from the high ranking officers who have attached their careers to systems competing for the $$ in the budget.

[Plawranc]

I would say that SEAD and Cyber-Warfare should be the main focus of AF research in this day an age. Hacking into a defence network and dropping everything except the radar emitters would be a nice prelude to a HARM barrage that wipes out all AA, AAA in the area.

The A-10 follows the same concept that the Stuka did, if there is opposition the A-10 will get blasted. However the hypocrisy of the AF Chiefs is just plain sickening. They claim the A-10 and other aircraft are wastes of money and need scrapping. Yet they continue to service the F-35 project, and on top of this, operate the F-22 which, next to the Galaxy has the highest service to flight hours rate of any serving aircraft in the US fleet.

I personally think they should rig catapult links to the A-10 and give it to the Marines. 

[DurrD]

There has been a bit of a paradigm shift in the USAF in the last 10 years.  The F-15C golden boys have had to sit the last 2 out mostly, and they have lost a lot of influence.  True warriors always march to the sound of the guns, and yes we have some warriors in the AF (at least a few)!  Whereas in the past, the top ranked guys in each UPT class chose F-15C's, now you see top guys picking the F-16 and A-10 more often so they can be where the action is.  The result of this is that CAS pilots are much more highly placed in the AF command structure than in the past.  

On the other hand, my previous commander (an A-10 pilot himself) thinks that we are going to slowly shift back to the more air-to-air and strategic focus given the new PACOM shift that we are starting to migrate towards.  The OEF/OIF veterans will be around for a long time, but you may see that focus shift back to the old ways over time.  

Hopefully not, and hopefully we didn't shift too far in the other direction.  Another thing we have seen in recent exercises is that the advanced skills used in a contested, degraded, or operationally constrained (CDO) environment have faded quite a bit.  Balance is required, and hopefully we don't err too far one way or the other.  There is room in the USAF for the strategic mission, as well as continuing to give world class support to our Army brothers in the CAS world.

[DurrD]

Plawranc,

The F-35 program has been a Charlie Foxtrot from the beginning, but we are committed now.  Other than the F-22 (and that train has left the station, the production line is closed with less than half built of what we needed) the F-35 is the only plane that has a chance of surviving in a modern IADS environment for the first week of the war.  I'm with you on the USMC version of the A-10 though, it would fit right in with the USMC style.  Maybe they would like to take them over.

Everybody is right though that is complaining about the A-10s retirement.  It is penny wise and pound foolish.  We could buy new A-10s for a fraction of the cost of a single F-35, and they (A-10s) aren't all that high mx of an aircraft relatively speaking.  I am fully in agreement that we should keep them.  Call your congressman if you feel really strongly about it, because in the end its going to come down to funding. 

We cannot lose the F-35 at this point, but hopefully the lesson has been learned in Congress as well as in the Pentagon of the pitfalls of trying to get one aircraft to do too much.  I doubt they have learned though, because we had plenty of historical examples, and they didn't learn from those.

As much as I love and respect the Marines (and I really do, after being deployed with them), the F35 debacle is largely their fault.  They insisted on a STOVL version to replace the Harrier, which is a boondoggle in its own right.  The concept of using a STOVL aircraft the way the USMC envisions has never been tested, and it is difficult to conceive of a scenario where it would even be useful, much less required.  The compromises demanded by the STOVL version have ruined the F-35.  It should been a simple cheap (relatively) fighter in the mold of the F-16, but with a stealthy design.  As it is, the airframe is so compromised that it is worse in many areas than most of the planes it is supposed to replace.  There is no alternative now though.  The F-35 came out of the JSF competition, and that happened in the early '90s.  It would take too long to gen up a replacement now.

As far as the MC rates on the F-22 and F-35, this is a phase that all new airplanes go through.  The F-16 had similar teething problems in the '80s for those that remember.  The Super Hornet, now touted as a possible alternative to the F-35 for the Navy faced similar criticism as it went through many of the same types of problems a few years back.  They will work through this with the new designs, but its going to take a lot of money unfortunately.

In the end though, like someone once said, "the only thing more expensive than a first-rate air force is a second rate air force".  The last American to die to enemy conventional air attack died in 1953.  Lets not break that streak anytime soon.