A-10 Warthog's Tusks Are Being Sharpened For A High-End Fight
- Thread starter BlueOvalFitter
- Start date
I haven't seen any damage on an A10 that was more amazing than the F15 with basically 1 wing.
Hmmm… so, too expensive to buy in numbers, you say?
750 have been built. 150+ being built every year.
280 A-10s in the inventory.
The USAF already has more F-35 than A-10.
With orders for 2,500 in total.
F-16s are wearing out, the F-35 is replacing them.
You keep talking about it being “fragile”. Not getting hit in a “fragile” airplane is a whole lot better than dying in a “tough” airplane because you couldn’t defend against an enemy.
There is a whole lot more to stealth employment, strike planning, and survivability, than the coatings on the airplane.
I’m no F-35 fan, but it’s light years ahead of the A-10 in effectiveness and survivability.
Pretty sure they’re TF-34This thing needs an engine update, those TF-30's are getting old.
I would think there is a place for the A-10. Slow flying can more easily, observe, pick out, and hit ground troops and targets. If needed, I would think the AF can give them overfly cover with F 15's, 16's, 35's, whatever is needed to get the A-10's weapons, accurately, on the ground targets. .02
If you've got those airplanes flying cover, they can deliver the weapon. Big duplication of effort to cover an airplane with another airplane.
It's like having a guy with an M-4 watch over a guy with an M-9. Why not have the guy with the M-4 shoot the bad guy?
What's the point of having the A-10 deliver the weapon, if you've got a weapon delivery platform overhead? Two airplanes to do the job of one...makes no sense.
There IS a place for the A-10: A combat area with no air threat, no surface to air threat, and tanks that need killing near an air base. But it's a one-trick pony.
Further, that scenario (permissive environment with bases near by) is really unlikely in future wars, and keeping the A-10 in service costs billions of dollars every year. Billions that could be spent expanding the capabilities of other airplanes.
Affirm.
Good points.
I spent much of my career doing air planning at the operational level. Real world experience at the USAF CAOC in Al Udeid and at sea with Marines and joint assets. Commanded Air Command and Control Squadrons. I trained at the USAF 505th Command and Control Squadron, later at the 710th as a senior officer.
Understanding how to build an air campaign, the capabilities and limitations of every platform that flew, working with and talking with the pilots of those platforms, have all shaped my opinion on various airplanes.
Then I worked in requirements (N8, J8) and learned what things cost from a programmatic perspective.
Vertical cuts - cutting an entire platform - are the best way to cut costs.
If you have a program of record, like an airplane, there is a huge personnel and infrastructure cost that supports it. To fly an airplane, you need a school for the pilots, a school for the maintainers, with instructors at both. You need dedicated test equipment and spare parts inventories. You’re paying for unique defense suppliers that build unique parts for that platform.
It’s huge. It’s expensive.
If you cut the number of airplanes by say, 50%, you only cut your program costs by about 10-20% because all that infrastructure, training facilities, suppliers, personnel are still there and take just about as much money as they did when the program was bigger.
Much as I don’t like the F-35, amortizing all that infrastructure over thousands of airframes actually makes a lot of sense.
Amortizing it over 270 airframes (the A-10 inventory) gets expensive.
It’s not that the A-10 is “bad”. It’s that the A-10 costs a lot of money to perform one mission.
As an air planner, the A-10 is a challenge. It can only be used for one thing. The F-15C is similar in that it does one thing, but that mission: air superiority (in various forms) is always required in campaign planning.
If you asked me, as an air planner, what I want on the ramp, in theater, I want F-15C, F-15E and F-16CJ. I want airplanes that can flex from air superiority and SEAD into interdiction and CAS as the campaign evolves.
Having an A-10 squadron on the ramp is a waste of space in the early days of the war. I could’ve had more useful airplanes at that base instead of A-10s that aren’t flying until much later.
It depends on the scenario, of course, but single mission airplanes always leave you short when you have multiple missions to execute,
particularly as the weight of effort, the apportionment of assets and missions, changes over a campaign.
Understanding how to build an air campaign, the capabilities and limitations of every platform that flew, working with and talking with the pilots of those platforms, have all shaped my opinion on various airplanes.
Then I worked in requirements (N8, J8) and learned what things cost from a programmatic perspective.
Vertical cuts - cutting an entire platform - are the best way to cut costs.
If you have a program of record, like an airplane, there is a huge personnel and infrastructure cost that supports it. To fly an airplane, you need a school for the pilots, a school for the maintainers, with instructors at both. You need dedicated test equipment and spare parts inventories. You’re paying for unique defense suppliers that build unique parts for that platform.
It’s huge. It’s expensive.
If you cut the number of airplanes by say, 50%, you only cut your program costs by about 10-20% because all that infrastructure, training facilities, suppliers, personnel are still there and take just about as much money as they did when the program was bigger.
Much as I don’t like the F-35, amortizing all that infrastructure over thousands of airframes actually makes a lot of sense.
Amortizing it over 270 airframes (the A-10 inventory) gets expensive.
It’s not that the A-10 is “bad”. It’s that the A-10 costs a lot of money to perform one mission.
As an air planner, the A-10 is a challenge. It can only be used for one thing. The F-15C is similar in that it does one thing, but that mission: air superiority (in various forms) is always required in campaign planning.
If you asked me, as an air planner, what I want on the ramp, in theater, I want F-15C, F-15E and F-16CJ. I want airplanes that can flex from air superiority and SEAD into interdiction and CAS as the campaign evolves.
Having an A-10 squadron on the ramp is a waste of space in the early days of the war. I could’ve had more useful airplanes at that base instead of A-10s that aren’t flying until much later.
It depends on the scenario, of course, but single mission airplanes always leave you short when you have multiple missions to execute,
particularly as the weight of effort, the apportionment of assets and missions, changes over a campaign.
But the guy who wants to have a taxi fleet does better with a couple dozen Corollas than a single Veyron. Eventually you have a bunch of airplanes that either you don't really have because they are so expensive there aren't enough to go around and you didn't get any this time or you have them and they sit on the ramp because they cost too much to risk losing them.
The arguments over the A-10 are basically over the priority CAS (close air support) should have. The guys on the ground want CAS loitering within minutes of their position all the time. The parents of the guys on the ground want that CAS, too. They bug their congressmen about it, too. The air force, on the other hand, sees CAS as a secondary role. If F-16's and F-35's can eventually get the job done, more or less, then what's the big deal? So what if they have a small fraction of the time on station and have to come from air fields far away a lot of the time? The fast movers look so much better on posters and are way more fun to fly.
So, bugging your congressman is how the USAF should buy airplanes?
Grunts telling USAF what airplane they want makes about as much sense as the Navy telling grunts what rifle they should carry.
Not even the 3 star grunt gets to tell the JFACC how to do his job. The JFLCC asks for service. The JFACC provides the service/strikes the targets/delivers effects.
That’s US doctrine. Has been for a while.
The A-10 is less capable at CAS, in many scenarios, than the B-1. Or the F-14.
So, if the grunts really wanted CAS, and a good FAC-A, they should’ve fought for the F-14.
Just because a grunt can see the airplane doesn’t mean it’s the best one for the job.
The B-1 has far better loiter time, high speed, and several times the weapon capacity that the A-10.
No “brrrt” but if the bad guy is vaporized by JDAM - who cares?
Bad guy dies either way. Grunt wins.
How many grunts die in the extra hour it takes an A-10 to get to the fight?
There aren’t always A-10s loitering overhead - because you can’t ever cover all of the fight.
A faster airplane gets the grunt CAS sooner. Better for the grunt, not just cool for the pilot.
And, if the grunt can see the airplane, so can the enemy. the A-10 can loiter just long enough for them to get AA assets in place, even if something like a shilka
How many were shot down during Operation Iraqi Freedom? Or in Afghanistan?
That’s precisely the point. None.
Because the air defenses were taken down to zero in the first few days. There was no air defense. In a permissive environment, the A-10 is great.
It’s like asking how many touchdowns you can run on a football field, when the other team is in the locker room. So what?
You‘re not a great player if you’re just running the entire field with no other team.
Put the other team on the field. Put a real air defense system in place: acquisition radars, fighters, SAMs, Command and Control.
The A-10 gets killed, easily, and quickly.
So the only answer is to employ something costing 20 times as much and only available in 20% of the quantity needed.
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