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>The A-10 is obsolete because it's an air frame built around a cannon

Gulf war 1: Destroyed more than 900 Iraqi tanks, 2,000 other military vehicles and 1,200 artillery pieces for the loss of four A-10s

Syria 2015: Single A-10 takes out 116 ISIS fuel trucks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ37y0yeSgc&feature=youtu.be...

It still has it's uses. Also consider the costs - if you're using a high flying F-35 and laser guided bombs they'll cost I don't know $20k each and it can only carry a few so the cost of taking out fuel trucks would quite likely be more than the value of the trucks. A big old cannon can probably do it quicker and much cheaper.

Gulf war 1 was 25 years ago, and that marked the last US conflict without ubiquitous precision guided weapons. That's probably right around the time the A-10 went obsolete.

In Syria... well, we could have used just about anything, from the AC-130 to the gun on the F-16. Fuel trucks are a pretty soft target.

>The A-10 was the bee's knees when it was new and we were worried about thousands of Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap. But it's not 1985 any more.

Nobody in Chair Force command ever liked the A10. And the A10 is performing CAS as a secondary role, not the one it was originally intended for; and it is worn out and obsolete, and does need replacement. The F35 just isn't the tool for the job and it won't ever be. The Super Tucano is much closer, but I'm still skeptical of it too.

> The troops like the A-10 because it's loud and impressive and makes them feel like they haven't been forgotten.

Even if this is entirely true, moral goes a hell of a long way on in the army as does the fear this creates with the enemy.

That said I was of the understanding the A-10 was very effective for supporting troops in areas like Afghanistan and similar low tech ground wars. The real issue the Air Force are tasked with protecting the country in the case of a 'real war' with more modernized opponents like China or Russia. In this case and A-10 is old tech and wont deliver much in terms of defense capability hence their lack of interest in maintaining/upgrading it.

Again, the A-10 only carried out 20% of the CAS missions in Afghanistan. It may have been very effective, but so was the F-16.

And there's no reason to keep it around for low tech wars - if we need a dedicated aircraft to destroy mud huts we'd be better off with something cheap and easy to maintain, like Embraer's Super Tucano II.

The number of CAS missions carried out is not a measure of the effectiveness of those missions.

The B-1 has dropped more ordnance in Afghanistan than any other aircraft. The combination of long range, high endurance, and big payload make it perfect for this role. But the A-10 has its fan club that ignores this.

If you look at how much the B-1 cost to develop and fly... Wow.

The cost of operating the B-1B is actually cheaper than both the B-52 and the B-2 (though that's not saying much since the B-2 is a hangar queen).

Afghanistan is a hard nut to crack due to being landlocked, surrounded by enemies, and with primitive facilities. B-1s do well in this situation since they can fly out of Diego Garcia, carry a shit ton of fuel, and munitions, and have a crew that is used to long duration flights. Once it was equipped with the AN/AAQ-28 Litening pod, it really came into its own for providing CAS.

People also misunderstand what CAS is. CAS stands for Close Air Support, but doesn't mean the aircraft providing it has to be close, but that the munitions are hitting close to the FEBA (where our troops are).

Pretty much everything is a lot cheaper to fly than the B-2 (by a wide margin) but I wonder about the B-52. It's such an anomaly. It does kind of seem like the last plane we still fly that was made to be a big, dumb bomb truck, which might be a pretty useful role with the new smart bombs, laser designation of targets, and so on.

But keeping all that old hardware flying...

The troops like the A-10 because it can loiter over them low and slow and provide support for a longer period than the F-35 will ever be able to. It can carry a substantial amount of ordinance beyond its impressive 30mm cannon. The mission of CAS is best served by the A-10 and not a fighter bomber which can't do either role well

I see a lot of people assert that, but I don't see any reason to believe it's true. Targeting pods and guided bombs make "low and slow" attacks unnecessarily risky, and the plane is too slow to get on station in emergencies.

Being loud and impressive should count twice since it counts against the guy on the other side.

The A10 is still good at CAS that's what it was designed to do. 1 A10 caries a much, much larger bomb load than an F35. If you have air superiority you need a good bomb truck a lot more useful than a stealth fighter.

What were the other 80% of CAS missions carried out by? What % of aircraft deployed were A10s? That 20% figure needs more to back it up.

Actually F-35A does 18,000lbs of ordinance to the A-10s 16,000. I believe there are variants with even more payload planned.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/a-10... https://web.archive.org/web/20110317113904/http://www.lockhe...

>The A10 is still good at CAS that's what it was designed to do.

That's not really true. The A-10 was designed to destroy tanks in Europe. CAS was always a secondary role.

>If you have air superiority you need a good bomb truck a lot more useful than a stealth fighter.

If that's the argument then the right thing to do is retire the A-10 and reactivate some B-1s.

>What were the other 80% of CAS missions carried out by? What % of aircraft deployed were A10s? That 20% figure needs more to back it up.

>Eighty percent of CAS missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have been conducted not by the A-10, but by an array of other aircraft, including AC-130’s, F-15E’s, F-16’s, MQ-1’, B-52’s, and yes, the B-1.

http://blogs.cfr.org/davidson/2014/05/20/if-the-air-force-ha...

The thrust of the article is correct. The reason people don't want to see the A-10 retired is the Air Force doesn't have a lot of credibility when it comes to CAS.

I used to have a link to a chart with percentages, but I can't find it.