Doing that (Taking CAS responsibilities from the USAF) is actually a wonderful idea. One of the reasons the F35 is such a cluster f is due to the Marines requiring it to more or less be a Harrier replacement. The Marines use the harriers primarily for CAS and I've targeted for them as well in Iraq when I was there ~2003-2004 during the big Fallujah offensive.
The solution here is to get rid of the A-10 and simply not do "nation building" and counter-insurgency in poor countries. We don't need the A-10 because it's useless for any war worth fighting in today's world.
Or not to get into wars in the first place; then you could give up having an Air Force at all, right?
Seriously, "stop doing COIN in poor countries" is a political solution that requires a top-down policy change that goes counter to the entire historical direction of US military involvement since Vietnam. The US very seldom tackles even a second-rate military armed with Russian cast-offs -- the most recent example was Iraq in 2003 -- so the A-10 is still useful for the sort of brushfire wars and missions you get involved with. Even though they'd die like flies in a shooting war with a real front-rank opponent. (Like who?)
Yeah? That was my whole point. You make it sound like it's crazy. It's the most sensible course.
(Tertiary source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ledeen )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7JM82fa5ZY
There are literally dozens and dozens of similar stories. The A10 is simply put the most effective CAS tool the US Military has or ever had. CAS is a very important part of US warfare and just because they might be against an enemy with better anti-air doesn't negate the need for boots on the ground, which require CAS for maximum survivability. Most likely the Stealth B2s or RQ-170 Sentinel would be sent in first to quickly take out as much of the AAA as possible.
Disclaimer: I'm a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom II, and flew the Shadow 200 TUAV. I targeted several times for A10s and have heard the BRRRRRRRRRRTTTTTT up close.
I showed a concrete example proving it. That was with an actual anti-aircraft missle. A manpad is much much smaller and the A10 was designed explicitly to take direct manpad strikes.
Like Dale Storr's OA-10, which took a single Strela hit and went down? The A-10 is certainly more likely to be mission killed by MANPADS and AAA than other aircraft (which are liable to be destroyed outright), but those that survive are not useful for combat--Kim Campbell's A-10 was grazed by a Shilka and rendered combat ineffective; after she landed it in manual reversion, it was shipped back to the US and required months of intensive repair. That's great if your objective function is maximizing the number of airframes that are eventually flyable again after being damaged, but godawful if your goal is to actually use them to perform CAS.
>The A10 is simply put the most effective CAS tool the US Military has or ever had.
I completely agree with this, but tools only benefit you /if you can use them/. A-10s cannot survive in contested airspace, and if the not-at-all-fearsome Iraqi Army spanking them so hard that they ended up with a 10,000 foot hard deck didn't clue politicians in on that, maybe a few videos of modern SHORAD like the Pantsir which are available for $peanuts will.
>just because they might be against an enemy with better anti-air doesn't negate the need for boots on the ground, which require CAS for maximum survivability
The CAS you get is better than the CAS you don't. If your primary CAS tool is the A-10, then being against an enemy with even the slightest anti-air capability means that you don't get any CAS at all.
>Most likely the Stealth B2s or RQ-170 Sentinel would be sent in first to quickly take out as much of the AAA as possible
The RQ-170 is a phenomenally expensive unarmed recon drone that the US operates a handful of. The B-2 is useful for striking an enormous number of fixed targets, but is not designed or intended to be employed in a SEAD/DEAD role against anything more mobile than theater-level air defenses. No SEAD weapon in the world is capable of striking air defenses that it isn't fired at, and as a result anything flying at low level is vulnerable to SHORAD whose operators use the advanced tactic of parking it in a treeline and waiting until they hear a jet to engage it.
So in summary, I think you're entirely right. The A10 was meant to be survivable in contested airspace of yesteryear, but gen 5 and the coming gen 6 fighers along with modern AAA would obliterate it. Even not entirely modern but very advanced AAA like maybe the S400, which Iran has, would knock out an A10 no problem. But the US wouldn't willingly put boots on the ground without utter dominance of the air first. You only need CAS when you have boots on the ground, so I see it ultimately as a moot point. China isn't stupid enough to go toe to toe to war with the US, as we'd both suffer heavy heavy casualties. They're doing a better job of simply asserting their strength economically and through cyber means, which they're better at than us.
Interesting that modern system like Pantsir seems to cover the F-35 case too: "Aerial targets include everything with a minimum radar-cross-section of 1 cm2 and speeds up to a maximum of 1,000 metre/second (Mach 3) within a maximum range of 20,000 metres and heights up to 15,000[7] metres". I don't think that F-35 RCS is less than 1 cm2.
Giving that and also that stealth isn't much of a stealth if there is a network of radars, including airborne ones, it doesn't seem like F-35 would be any better than A-10 in CAS against modern military, while against bearded guys with AKs in desert the A-10 is just more powerful and cheaper.
This is why I don't like the A-10. The environment in which the aircraft is expected to fly is much more dangerous than it used to be. Against a competent opponent we'd see A-10s getting shot down one after another.